FORTY-FIRST ANNUA!. CONVENTION 279 



Mixtures With Small Grains. 



The field pea is often sown in mixtures with small grains, 

 primarily to hold the vines off the ground and thus make the 

 harvesting of the crop easy. Oats are more often used for this 

 purpose than the other grains, although barley is used to somej 

 extent and wheat in a few cases. The yield is nearly always 

 larger when oats are used than with either barley or wheat. 

 ]\Iixtures are recommended in all cases where the crop is to be 

 used exclusively for hay. The presence of oats or barley in the 

 pea hay makes a better quality of feed than pea hay alone. 



Mixtures are occasionally used when the field pea is grown 

 for grain purposes, and in this case the peas and small grain are 

 thrashed out together and the seed separated by means of sieves, 

 either in the thrashing machine itself or in a fanning mill after- 

 wards. It is doubtful, however, whether the greater ease of har- 

 vesting is sufficient to overcome the additional trouble required 

 to separate the peas and grain. 



Field Peas as a Grain Crop. 



Field-pea seed has been used quite extensively by the farm- 

 ers of Ontario in feeding farm animals, and beef, mutton, and 

 pork produced with a ration composed partly of field peas is said 

 -to have a particularly agreeable flavor. Feeding experiments, 

 however, indicate that the peas used alone as the grain part of a 

 ration are no better than corn, bushel for bushel, in amount of 

 grain produced and are a much more expensive feed. 



The field pea is reported also as being very efficient in l-ia 

 ration for milch cows, especially when the peas are mixed with 

 oats. It is doubtful whether a feeder is ever justified in using 

 field-pea seed alone, for several reasons. In the first place, when 

 ground or crushed the meal is heavy and hard to digest, and iuj 

 addition to this failing it is too high in protein and too low in 

 fat to make its use as a concentrate economical unless it is mixed 

 with other grain feeds strong in fat and carbohydrates. Table I, 

 Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 84, illus- 

 trates this point. 



