370 
FIELD EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED IN 1889 AND 
1890 BY LOCAL AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES. 
TuE three societies which, in conjunction with the Royal Agricul- 
tural Society of England, began in 1886 to take up experimental 
work in the field continued their investigations during 1889 and 
1890. These societies were the following : 
The Essex Agricultural Society. 
The Royal Manchester, Liverpool, and North Lancashire Agri- 
cultural Society. 
The Norfolk Chamber of Agriculture. 
I. Essex Agricultural Society, 
(Abstract of Report of Mr. Bernard Dyer, B.Sc, F.C.S., F.L.S., 
ifcc, Consulting Chemist to the Society, and Mr. E. Rosling, 
F.R.M.S., of Melbourne, Chelmsford.) 
In 1889, as in previous years, there Nvere two sets of experiments : — ■ 
A. Continuation of the mangel experiments of 1888, by the 
growth of oats (unmanured), in order to ascertain the after-effects 
of the manures applied for the mangel. 
B. Experiments in mangel manuring differing somewhat from 
the previous experiments. 
A.— In both 1887 and 1888 it was found that the heaviest and 
most highly-manured mangel crop was followed by the best oat crop. 
These results are practically confirmed once more by the experiments 
of 1889. 
As reported in 1888, there was a partial failure of the mangel 
crop of that year, which, together with other circumstances, pre- 
vented the drawing of satisfactory conclusions so far as the 
manuring for mangel was concerned. Oats followed upon the same 
land, and the following table (page 380) gives the summary of the 
results for the two years. 
From a consideration of these results, it appears that the use of 
dung alone gave a return of less than half a ton of mangel (owing, 
to a great extent, to failure of plant), and an increase of 12^ bushels 
of oats and 6 cwt. straw. The use of artificials without nitrate of 
soda, in addition to dung, gave nearly 3 tons of mangel more than 
dung alone, but not an appreciably larger oat crop Dressings of 
artificials, including in each case 2 cwt. of nitrate of soda in addition 
to dung, gave about 4 tons of mangel more than dung alone, 3 
bushels more of oats, and 4 cwt. more straw. When the ai'tificial 
dressing added to the dung included 4 cwt. of nitrate of soda per 
acre, the increase over dung alone was, on the average, nearly 6g tons 
of mangel and 12 bushels of oats. 
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