Wheat

an important food plant. Like the other cereals wheat is a cultivated grass. It is supposed to have originated from a grass still found in the vicinity of the Mediterranean. The seeds or grains grow in close four-sided heads indicating a closer relationship to rye and barley than to rice and oats which grow in open panicles. Two or three species of wild wheat, including quack grass, are found in North America.

Egypt was the first country to gain a reputation for wheat raising. It long supplied the Mediterranean countries with bread-stuffs. Wheat was brought across the Mediterranean to Rome in large jars packed aboard ship in rows. So many were broken before they came ashore that a large mound, almost a mountain, of pottery fragments grew up at the mouth of the Tiber.

Wheat contains more food in a given bulk than rice or any other grain. It is now the principal breadstuff among civilized nations, and is gaining consumers rapidly. Wheat is an annual plant. It requires less rain than any other cereal. Winter wheat is sowed in the fall. Spring wheat is sowed in the spring. Improved machinery for plowing, seeding, reaping, and threshing, transporting and milling, have not only reduced the cost of production but have made it possible to feed the world with a wheat loaf. The present rapid extension of the wheat area in Australia, Argentina, and the Canadian Northwest indicates that wheat production has made but a beginning.

Students claim that the cost of raising wheat is being reduced rapidly. In 1830 it was considered that three hours of human labor would produce a bushel of wheat; in 1896, so great was the improvement in machinery, 10 minutes or one-eighteenth as much labor was a sufficient allowance per bushel. This means that one man can raise the wheat while the other seventeen men do something else.

The harvesting of wheat goes forward the year around without ceasing. As these lines are read some part of the world is cutting wheat. It is hardly stretching the truth to assert that golden wheat is falling before the sickle somewhere at every tick of the clock night and day from January to December.

WHEAT HARVEST. January: Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. February: India. March: Upper Egypt, India. April: Lower Egypt, Mexico, Turkey, Persia, and Asia Minor. May: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Central Asia, China, Japan, and Texas. June: California, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Oregon, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri. July: France, Austria-Hungary, Roumania, Southern Russia, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, New England, and Upper Canada. August: England and Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Poland, North Dakota, Northern Minnesota, Lower Canada, and British Columbia. September: Scotland, Sweden and Norway, Manitoba. October: Northern Russia and Siberia. November: Peru and Southern Africa. December: Burmah, New Zealand, and Chile.

Of the various states, Kansas, Minnesota, or North Dakota leads, according to the season, with a yield of from 50,000,000 to 95,000,000 bushels each. South Dakota and Nebraska come next. California, Washington, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania can be depended upon for about 30,000,000 bushels each. Vermont and Massachusetts report from 30,000 to 40,000 bushels a year. Rhode Island and Florida do not appear in wheat statistics. If sound spring wheat be ground it yields about seventy-two per cent of its own weight of flour, three per cent low grade flour known as "red dog," and twenty-five per cent of bran and shorts. When burned, wheat kernels yield two per cent of ash or earthy matter. Wheat straw contains about five per cent of mineral matter. Wheat is able to stand a cold, wet spring better than other grains. It sprouts at a temperature of 35 deg. F., while corn requires 48 deg. F.

The Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture for 1908 presented the following estimate of the wheat crop in the countries named:

The annual wheat yield of the United States computed for a series of years is about 7.9 bushels per person.

The following estimate of the American yield for 1909 is that made by the Orange Judd Farmer:

See Durum Wheat; Plow; Harrow; Reaper; Threshing Machine; Flour; Gluten; Bread; Yeast; Elevator

Each wheat, too, has its own life history and romance. Take Fife wheats, which were the foundation of many varieties in spring wheats up to the introduction of durum wheat. Years ago, nearly a century ago, David Fife, a Scotchman of Otonabee, Ont., sent to a friend in Glasgow for a small bag of seed wheat to try in a cleared patch of the backwoods. The friend obtained some seed from a vessel just in from Dantzic. Unfortunately, it was a fall wheat and reached David Fife in the spring. Nevertheless, David Fife sowed it in the spring. One can guess how feverishly the backwoods farmer watched for the growth of his experiment. Only three wheat heads survived till the fall; but those three wheat heads were entirely free of the rust that had ruined his neighbor's crops; and those three heads really represented a new variety of wheat, a fall wheat turned into a spring wheat. David Fife treasured the three heads and planted them in spring. Such was the beginning of Fife wheat in America. It is thought it must have come originally from Russia; for, crossed with Russian Ladoga by Dr. Saunders, of Ottawa, it has produced a wheat splendidly adapted for the cold climate and long summer sunlight of the northwest.--Outing Magazine.

In respect to no other one article has change in the conditions of production and distribution been productive of such momentous consequences as in the case of wheat. On the great wheat-fields of the State of Dakota, where machinery is applied to agriculture to such an extent that the requirement for manual labor has been reduced to a minimum, the annual product of one man's labor, working to the best advantage, is understood to be now equivalent to the production of 5,500 bushels of wheat. In the great mills of Minnesota, the labor of another one man for a year, under similar conditions as regards machinery, is in like manner equivalent to the conversion of this unit of 5,500 bushels of wheat into 1,000 barrels of flour, leaving 500 bushels for seed purposes; and although the conditions for analysis of the next step in the way of results are more difficult, it is reasonably certain that the year's labor of one and a half men more--or, at the most, two men--employed in railroad transportation, is equivalent to putting this 1,000 barrels of flour on a dock in New York ready for exportation, where the addition of a fraction of a cent a pound to the price will further transport and deliver it at almost any port of Europe.

Here, then, we have the labor of three men for one year, working with machinery, resulting in the producing all the flour that 1,000 other men ordinarily eat in a year, allowing one barrel of flour for the average consumption of each adult. Before such a result the question of wages paid in the different branches of flour production and transportation becomes an insignificant factor in determining a market; and, accordingly, American flour grown in Dakota and ground in Minneapolis, from 1,000 to 1,500 miles from the nearest seaboard, and under the auspices of men paid from $1.50 to $2.50 per day for their labor, is sold in European markets at rates which are determinative of the prices which Russian peasants, Egyptian "fellahs," and Indian "ryots" can obtain in the same markets for similar grain.--D. A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes.