THIRD DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 269 



soil and climate. In addition to this, we must produce the kind or 

 style of wheat most in demand in the market where it is to be sold. 

 England is and must be our principal market for a long time 

 to come. The home-grown wheats of Great Britain are dark 

 heavy glutinous wheats. So are the wheats of Russia and our own 

 States of the great northern Mississippi Valley, from which England 

 draws her largest supplies. These dark kinds of wheat, make dark, 

 heavy flour, and the English millers want lighter white wheat to 

 mix with them to enliven the flour and make better bread. Our 

 climate is peculiarly adapted to the growth of these white wheats 

 most in demand in the English markets, where they are, without 

 distinction as to our local names, termed " club wheat." Hence, in 

 selecting our seed we should, as a rule, select the white varieties. 

 The question of the best of these white varieties can only be settled 

 by experiments in different localities. Outside of the College of 

 Agriculture, from whose grounds were exhibited at the State Fair 

 this year eighty-six varieties of wheat, a resident of this district and 

 this county has the credit of conducting the most important experi- 

 ments in wheat culture in the State. John Bidwell exhibited seven- 

 teen distinct varieties of wheat at the State Fair, and to two of these 

 varieties, the Tuscany and the Genesee, a most competent com- 

 mittee of millers and farmers awarded the first premium. They 

 also commended very highly the Propo Australian Club, and Sonora, 

 exhibited by G. W. Colby, another farmer of this district and county, 

 and the Tuscany and White Chili, exhibited by H. Cronkite, of Sac- 

 ramento County. It is a well known fact that wheat will do much 

 better when the seed is changed frequently, so as to vary the climate 

 and soil. Later importations of seed from Australia, Chili, and from 

 some European countries, have added very materially to the product 

 of the State, even though the importations have been of the same 

 varieties of seed as those they were imported to supplant. A change 

 of climate is good for seed wheat as well as for sickly persons or 

 animals. Next, as to cultivation. That Summer fallowing is the 

 best system for this State is almost universally believed by our 

 farmers. But will Summer fallowing alone keep up the fertility and 

 productiveness of the soil ? The great question in California wheat 

 growing is, how best to keep up the fertility and productiveness of 

 the soil. We know that it has been stated of late, from a high place, 

 that the seasons, as well as the condition and fertility of the soil, 

 have very much to do with the wheat crop of the State. While 

 the experience of the present season may justify this statement in 

 a limited sense, the inferences liable to be drawn from it are dan- 

 gerous and deceitful in the extreme. If the statement was simply 

 intended to convey the idea that soil, exhausted by cropping for a 

 long series of years, will produce a much better crop in a favorable 

 season than in an unfavorable one, we can fully indorse it. But if it 

 was meant to sanction the false idea that California soil has an 

 inexhaustible treasure of fertility in it — that California farmers can 

 continue to take from their lands annual or even biennial crops 

 of wheat, without exhausting their fertility and rendering their 

 cultivation m wheat unprofitable and even ruinous — then we dis- 

 agree with it in the most emphatic manner. 



The experience of wheat growing in every country, since wheat has 

 been cultivated by man as food for the human family, has been a 

 disproof of this dangerous doctrine. The history of wheat growing 



