UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTU 
DEPARTMENT BULLETIN No. 1172 
Washington, D. C. T August, 1923 
CEREAL EXPERIMENTS AT CHICO, CALIFORNIA 
By Victor H. Florell, Assistant Agronomist, Office of Cereal Investigations, 
Bureau of Plant Industry . 
CONTENTS. 
Page. 
Introduction , 1 
The Sacramento Valley 1 
The Plant Introduction Station 6 
Experimental methods 9 
Preparation of the land 9 
Plat experiments 10 
Nursery experiments 10 
Page. 
Experimental data 11 
Wheat experiments 12 
Barley experiments 24 
Oat experiments 29 
Miscellaneous experiments and notes 31 
Summary 32 
INTRODUCTION. 
Experiments with cereals under dry-land conditions in the Sacra- 
mento Valley have been conducted since 1910 at the Plant Introduc- 
tion Station, Chico, Calif., in cooperation with the Office of Foreign 
Seed and Plant Introduction of the Bureau of Plant Industry. At 
the end of the crop season of 1921 the investigations were trans- 
ferred to the University Farm, Davis, Calif., where they wall be 
conducted in cooperation with the California Agricultural Experi- 
ment Station. The results obtained at Chico in the principal lines 
of experimentation during this period are presented in this bulletin. 
The more important lines of investigation have been varietal experi- 
ments with wheat, barley, and oats and breeding and classification 
studies with w r heat. 
Chico is located in the northern third of the Sacramento Valley, 
about 100 miles north of Sacramento, and its soil and climate are 
fairly representative of conditions which prevail over most of the 
district. 
THE SACRAMENTO VALLEY. 
The Sacramento Valley lies in the middle of the north-central 
part of California. (Fig. 1.) It parallels approximately the eastern 
and western boundaries of the State and extends from Redding in 
the north, where the Sacramento River emerges from the Sacra- 
mento Canyon, to the union of the Sacramento and San Joaquin 
Eivers in the south. It is traversed longitudinally by the Sacra- 
mento River and is inclosed by the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the 
east and the Coast Range on the w T est. 
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