128 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



MISTAKES IN WHEAT CULTURE AND HARVESTING 



IN CALIFORNIA 



BY I. N. HOAG, AGRICULTURAL EDITOR OF THE RECORD-UNION. 



The cultivation of wheat has formed one of the principal employ- 

 ments of man since the remotest periods of antiquity. Ancient history, 

 both sacred and profane, give accounts of the manner in which wheat 

 was sown, cultivated, harvested, and prepared for food since the first 

 historical periods of the world. As nations have arisen and advanced 

 to civilization and power, wheat culture has increased, and wheat has 

 become more and more the principal article of food. The Chinese 

 and Japanese are the onlj^ important exceptions to this general rule. 

 Rice has been with them what wheat has been to the other great 

 nations of the earth, and the check in the advancement of their civil- 

 ization is attributable, it is believed by many, mainly to the inferiority 

 of rice to wheat as food for man. The modes of sowing, cultivating, 

 and harvesting wheat have changed materially since the Romans 

 plowed the ground with a crooked stick, brushed the seed in with the 

 top of a tree, and gathered the golden grain with a hook or hand- 

 sickle, but the principal changes in these plans of working have taken 

 place within the last half century. The United States has within that 

 time become the greatest wheat-growing country in the world, and 

 within the last quarter of a century, or since 1850, the product of Cal- 

 ifornia has increased from 15,000 to 40,000,000 bushels. The old modes 

 of cultivation could never have brought about such a product. 

 Nothing but the facilities of the gang-plow to turn up the soil, the 

 seed sower to sow the seed, the immense harrows in use in this State 

 to cover it, could render it possible to put in such a crop as was put 

 in in 1877-8, and had not the improved facilities for harvesting and 

 thrashing it been invented and brought into use it would have been 

 impossible to have secured the crops that have been produced in this 

 State for the past few years. We have been rushing into the wheat 

 business so rapidly, and it has been, as a rule, so profitable to indi- 

 viduals, and of such great immediate financial gain to the people as 

 a whole, that we have not taken time to inquire whether we have not 

 been making many mistakes as individuals and as a State. 



Twenty years ago the average yield of wheat in California was forty 

 bushels per acre, while to-day the average yield is hardly twenty. 

 One of the main causes of this shrinkage, no doubt, is the defertiliza- 

 tion of th,e soil. We have been drawing from the soil cultivated in 

 wheat the properties required to produce wheat, and we have not 

 returned to the soil anything to restore these properties. Under 

 these circumstances is it any wonder that our wheat yield has 

 decreased per acre ? But tliis decrease in bulk or weight is not the 

 only way in which we have been losers in wheat culture. Twenty 

 years ago our wheat was counted the best wheat sold in the Liverpool 



