22 
Colorado Experiment Station 
which are mostly due to the land on which the wheat was grown. 
They further show that there are still greater differences 
between varieties. The highest protein percentage for the 
Defiance is 14.92, for Marquis 16.00 and for Red Fife 17.14. Of 
course these are all excellent samples, but the Red Fife is much 
better than the Defiance. The Kubanka, which is a maccaroni 
wheat, is not so rich in crude protein as one would expect; with 
us it is not an especially high protein wheat though it is a hard 
wheat. 
We see the same variations in the amounts of protein in the 
winter wheats and these variations are largely due to the same 
causes, the principal one of which is the variation in the amount of 
nitric nitrogen in the soil. 
SPRING WHEATS USED IN EXPERIMENT 
It is the province of the agronomist to point out whether it 
is better to grow spring or winter wheat, and to determine the 
best varieties of these to be grown, but we chose spring wheats 
with which to experiment. We made this choice for the following 
reasons: First, The time from planting till harvest is short; 
second, The growing period is continuous; third, The spring 
wheats are known to be of excellent quality; fourth, Because, up 
to within a very few years, spring wheat was the principal wheat 
grown in the State. 
The first fact enabled us to follow the effects of our fertilizers 
quite easily, the second removed the uncertainty of changes in 
both the soil and plants during the winter or resting months and 
the third feature promised us a bigger range of effects of fertil¬ 
izers, or weather, on the amount of protein present in the grain. 
We chose three varieties, our Colorado Defiance because it has 
been our most popular wheat and I do not know but that it still 
is, the Red Fife because it is a dark-colored wheat of the very 
best repute in the northwest, and the Kubanka because it is prob¬ 
ably the best of the durum wheats. 
The reader already knows that the object of the investigation 
was to find out the reason for the softening of wheats in Colorado. 
We assumed that the general opinion held on this subject and in 
regard to the quality of our flour was correct on the principle that 
what is generally believed has its foundation in facts and is not 
prejudice created by a continued effort to depress the selling price 
of the grain. The general samples given, both those of spring and 
winter wheats, show that there are enough samples of poor wheat 
to give color to very bad stories about our wheat. There must be 
some cause for these poor wheats which probably have given rise 
