THE SUNFLOWER AS A SILAGE CROP. 5 
England States, northern New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Min- 
nesota, in North Dakota, Montana, Washington, and Oregon, and 
also in some of the high valleys of the Rocky Mountain region, such 
as the San Luis Valley of Colorado. 
Sunflowers have been found much more resistant to frost than corn. 
An observer in Michigan claims that they will " push back the frost 
line three weeks " in that State. A correspondent in New York 
writes that his sunflowers were green in the fall two weeks after corn 
had been killed by frost. These observations explain why sunflowers 
succeed in the high altitudes of Colorado and other Western States 
where frosts often occur during the growing season. 
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Fig. 1. — A field in Ellis County, Kans., overrun by wild sunflowers during the wet season 
of 1915. 
VALUE OF SUNFLOWERS IN THE SEMIARID REGIONS. 
On account of the fact that sunflowers grow wild in western Kan- 
sas (fig. 1), Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, as well as 
in eastern Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, it was anticipated that 
they would be important as a silage crop in dry regions. This has 
not proved to be the case. The yields at dry-land stations south of 
the Dakotas have not been large enough to warrant their production 
under cultivation. Field tests show that the sorghums give much 
higher yields under such conditions. 
At the Fort Hays Experiment Station, Hays, Kans., sunflowers 
were grown first in 1913. This was an unusually dry year and the 
plants made a very poor showing. None of them grew over a foot 
and a half high, and the yield was small. The better varieties of 
sorghum under the same conditions made a yield of 2 to 2-J tons of 
