Abstract
THE meeting this year was one of the most successful held since agriculture has been recognised at the British Association, both the quality of the papers and the attendance at the section being exceedingly good. Prof. Wood, in his presidential address, dealt with a problem which has now assumed very great importance. Hitherto the agricultural expert working in the counties and among farmers, has had to demonstrate certain facts which were already known at the experiment stations. One of the most important is the effect of phosphates in improving grassland, an effect so striking that it can be demonstrated without very refined experiments, so that the “single-plot method” serves the purpose very well. Another fact which had to be demonstrated and where the same method suffices is that in the case of mqst of the late-cropping varieties of potatoes the use of seed from certain districts in Scotland or the north of Ireland is profitable. But there are many cases where the somewhat crude single-plot method gives only indefinite results, and careful investigation has shown it to be incapable of revealing differences less than 10 or 15 per cent.; more refined methods are needed as soon as quantities of this order are to be dealt with. Prof. Wood went on to deal with some of these new methods and to urge their more general adoption in field work.
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Agriculture at the British Association . Nature 92, 514–516 (1914). https://doi.org/10.1038/092514b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/092514b0