RELATIVE YIELD OF DIGESTIBLE MATERIAL IN 

 EARLY-CUT AND LATE-CUT TIMOTHY HAY. 



The old discussion with regard to the best time of cutting grass 

 for the purpose of making hay, cannot be said to have ceased, 

 neither can it be safely asserted that the problem involved in this 

 discussion has been solved. To be sure, quite an amount of 

 experimental work has been done with reference to this question, 

 but this work, much of it, has not been especially exhaustive. 

 "We have contented ourselves with measuring out plots of grass 

 of as uniform character as possible, cutting these plots at differ- 

 ent periods of growth and weighing the resulting hay. This is 

 good as far as it goes, in fact, up to a certain point, is the best 

 we can do. The true standard for judging the production with 

 any given crop, is the resulting amount of digestible material 

 rather than the total weight of the crop. The writer believes 

 that in testing this matter of the economical time for cutting 

 grass, two things are essential in order to obtain reliable results. 



(1.) That a large number of tests shall be made, including a 

 series of years. 



(2.) That not the weight of the crop merely, but the 

 amount of digestible material shall be ascertained. 



Investigations of this kind are now being conducted in ac- 

 cordance with the above views. Whatever tests are being made 

 of production with any crop, are being made in this way. 

 The following experiment is the second one undertaken by this 

 Station, that has had for its object the determination of the 

 amount of digestible material in early-cut and in late-cut 

 Timothy hay. The first experiment is reported in the Station 

 Report for 1889, pages 44 to 45. In the summer of 1889, 

 fourteen equal sized plots of very uniform grass were measured 

 out, ten of these plots being located in one field and four in 

 another. The size of each of the ten plots was 30x50 feet, and 

 of each of the other four plots, .33x90 feet. One-half of these 

 plots was cut on July 1st and the other half on July 18th. At 



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