28 SOUTHERN FIELD CROPS 



clover with the seed oats in September or October 

 (Fig. 11). 



For oats sown after Christmas in the Gulf States the yields may 

 be taken as not quite two thirds of the figures for fall-sown oats 

 on the same land. 



In several instances yields of more than 100 bushels per acre 

 have been reported in the Southern States. 



At the Alabama Experiment Station on poor, sandy loam soil 

 the yield averaged about one and one haK times as many bushels 

 of fall-sown oats as of corn similarly fertilized. Considering that 

 oats weigh 32 pounds per bushel, as compared with 56 pounds per 

 bushel of corn, there was nearly an equal weight of grain produced 

 whether the crop was corn or oats. 



In the case of a medium yield of Red Rust-proof oats there is 

 about one pound of straw for each pound of threshed grain. 

 That is, a yield of 32 bushels of oats, weighing 960 pounds, is 

 usually accompanied by a yield of about half a ton of straw. 



34. Teams and labor for oat culture. — The oat crop 



requires little expenditure for hand labor. Machinery 

 and horse tools perform most of the work. By sowing 

 oats in the fall, the farm teams are kept employed at a 

 time when, on cotton-farms, there is usually no large 

 amount of other work for them. However, the date of 

 harvesting occurs during the busy season when teams and 

 laborers are needed in the early tilling of cotton and the 

 tillage of corn. Therefore any farm on which a consider- 

 able proportion of the acreage is devoted to oats should be 

 well stocked with teams and so situated that additional 

 laborers can be hired for a few days during harvest. 



When additional day labor cannot be hired to shock a 

 large area of oats in a brief time, the harvest season can 

 be spread out over a longer period by sowing a part of the 



