176 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



It is difficult to say why it has not been done. I have 

 asked hundreds of times perhaps, at different farmers' insti- 

 tutes where I have been, " Do you raise any wheat here on 

 your farms ?"—" Well, no." — "Why not?" Well, the 

 answer will be pretty much like this : " Grandfather tried it, 

 and he never had any luck ; and father always said he could 

 never raise any wheat on our land ; and I have never tried 

 it." That is about all the answer I have ever been able to 

 get, that the man's father or grandfather tried it, and did 

 not meet with any success. I believe, that, owing to climatic 

 changes, we can have better success in growing wheat now 

 than formerly. You know that in 1838 the Massachusetts 

 Legislature offered a premium for the largest amount of 

 wheat raised on a farm. The following year Massachusetts 

 raised a hundred and fifty-seven thousand bushels of wheat; 

 and for two years it was largely grown. But it must be 

 confessed that it was not at that time successful as a crop. 

 There were many things which interfered with its growth, — 

 there were weevils, there were blights and rusts, there were 

 insects. At the present time we seem to be exempt from 

 these difficulties in this part of the country. I hear no com- 

 plaint in my own county, or at any of the institutes I have 

 visited, of blight ; I hear no complaint of the weevil, the 

 midge, or Hessian fly. Those were the three evils that 

 afflicted farmers in former years. There is occasionally 

 smut, and sometimes rust ; but Massachusetts has continued 

 to grow, from 1840 down to the present time, a larger 

 quantity of wheat to the acre than any other State in the 

 Union, and Franklin County shows a greater acreage of 

 wheat than any other county in INIassachusetts. You can 

 grow thirty bushels of wheat to the acre just as well as 

 fifteen bushels of rye ; and it is a better crop, if you are 

 going to seed down with grain, than rye or oats ; and from 

 it you can have the very best flour, if you have mills in 

 your vicinity, and, if not, it will pay to take your wheat 

 a dozen or fifteen miles to a good mill. You will get from 

 your thirty bushels of wheat six barrels of flour, six hun- 

 dred pounds of middlings, and the straw. The straw is 

 not so good as rye-straw; but you can get about ten dollars' 

 worth of straw at any going price, and make it a consider- 

 ably more profitable crop than rye. 



