— 5 — 
Each of these tests will be considered by itself, but at the out- 
set it is necessary to make some explanations. 
The following general statements apply to all the experiments 
at Fort Collins. The piece selected was a rather heavy clay loam, 
sloping slightly to the south. The ground had been heavily 
manured the spring of 1896 at the rate of nearly sixty tons per 
acre of well- rotted stable manure. It w^as cropped during 1896 
and 1897 with corn. The spring of 1898 it was plowed in sections. 
A part of the section was planted the day it was plowed, the rest 
was allowed to lie from two to four days before ;t was planted. The 
seed was sown with an ordinary wheat drill in rows twenty-four 
inches apart. A few row^s that will be specially mentioned were 
sown with a hand garden drill in rows eighteen inches apart. As 
soon as the beets broke through the ground so as to define the rows, 
they were wheel hoed by hand. Later they were thinned, hand- 
hoed, cultivated three times with a horse cultivator, and twice irri- 
gated, on June 27 and July 19. 
The first set of samples was taken the last of SejJember, after a 
period of long continued and severe drought. The last samples 
were taken October 22. Between these two dates there had been 
several rains, giving a total precipitation of three-fourths of an inch 
and dampening the beets to the bottom of the furrow. The beets 
were dug during the following week, with no further rain. Each of 
the 176 rows was dug in two parts and each part weighed separately. 
Every beet on the field was counted, to get the stand under the 
various conditions, and about half of them were counted the second 
time. This work involved about a thousand weighings and the 
counting of over sixty thousand beets. 
The plantings at Fort Collins were made May 10, May 27 and 
June 15, with supplementary plantings May 13 and May 31. It 
had been expected to make four plantings, but a very heavy snow 
storm set in the last of April, with a total precipitation of three 
inches. None of this ran ofi’ a'^d the ground was thoroughly soaked 
to a depth of eight inches. It was not until the second week in 
May that the soil dried out enough so that it could be worked. 
This storm had a far reaching effect on the sugar beet work of 
the season. It saturated the ground wdthout packing it, and to this 
is largely due the almost perfect germination obtained and the 
small influence observed from soaking the seed or irrigating at time 
of planting. The influence of this storm was still felt at the time of 
the second planting, the last of May, and the ground was hardly 
dried out by the last planting, the middle of June. The same 
storm will be referred to later with reference to its effect on the 
beets at Rocky Ford. 
Before giving the detailed record of the various tests, it may be 
well enough to notice the analyses of the two sets of samples. Both 
