16 



N. H. Agricultural Experiment Station [Sta. Bull. 314 



better lands and that poor farms witliout stock and drifting toward 

 abandonment will probably not be greatly influenced by the program. 

 This may be a desirable trend providing the farms abandoned are the 

 poorer farms in bad locations and providing they are not useful later if 

 a forest farming economy develops. 



A large part of the tillage land not associated with livestock is on resi- 

 dence farms and few of these are represented in the program. (Fig. 

 4) If no livestock is to be kept on these locations, it normally will not 

 pay the owner to attempt to maintain or build up the yields of rough- 

 age. 



Estimating present yields at one-third ton per acre, these fields tend- 

 ing toward abandonment which are not represented in the program are 

 now yielding 38,000 tons or sufficient roughage for 12,600 cows. 



Per Cent of Tillage Land Reseeded 



Frequent reseeding with clover and alfalfa increases the yielding 

 capacity of the soil. There is indeed considerable experiment station 

 literature indicating the power of frequent legume reseedings to add 

 both organic matter and nitrogen to the soil. It should be stated here, 

 however, that a few New England leaders discount the advantages of 

 reseeding with clover and alfalfa and suggest instead applications of 

 commercial nitrogen. 



As indicated in Table 17, -46 per cent of the tillage land was asso- 

 ciated with farms that made no new seedings in 1937. Another 17 per 

 cent was on farms where some but less than 5 per cent was reseeded. 

 Thus 63 per cent of the total tillage was associated with farms where 

 less than one-twentieth of the tillage land was reseeded in 1937. 



A great deal of the failure to reseed was on non-commercial farms 

 where the operator had no great need for more hay and no equipment 

 to do the work. On active commercial farms much of the failure to 

 reseed some land was on apple and poultry farms where reseeding may 



* Does not include new seeding in pastures. 



t Includes all subsistence farms whether or not enrolled in the program. 



