376 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



and unbolted, makes the healthiest bread we can eat; but 

 between that and the superfine flour of the West is a true 

 medium of making sweet white flour, retaining the nutritive 

 portion. Many of our best farmers in the western part of 

 the State have never had a barrel of flour in their families 

 that was not grown on their own farms ; and they and their 

 wives, and many who have sat at meat and broken bread at 

 their hospitable tables, find it unsurpassed. 



In Franklin County one of the leading farmers, who 

 spreads a generous table, has on it bread from ninety bush- 

 els of wheat grown on his farm from two acres in 1880, 

 and has recently harvested from four acres a hundred and 

 sixty-eight bushels. Another has often had forty bushels, 

 and for twenty years has grown his own flour with never less 

 than twenty-five bushels to the acre. An honored, white- 

 haired farmer from the hills west of Greenfield may be seen, 

 on some day in early winter, passing through that village on 

 his way to mill, with a wagon-load of wheat from his own 

 farm for his year's supply of flour, as he has done for nearly 

 a half-century with scarcely a failure ; and his is usually 

 spring wheat. 



It is a creditable fact that Franklin County raises more 

 wheat than all the rest of the State of Massachusetts. 



It has never been satisfactorily shown why, in a moderate 

 way, wheat may not, here in the mixed farming of New 

 England, give a fair return. 



In looking over the statements of wheat-growers, as re- 

 turned in our State reports, none appear where the crop was 

 less than thirty bushels to the acre, or the cost of produc- 

 tion, including fertilizers, over fifty cents per bushel. 



With thirty bushels to the acre, worth a dollar and a half 

 per bushel, and ten dollars for the straw, making fifty-five 

 dollars, and deducting the cost of raising and harvesting at 

 fifty cents per bushel, you have forty dollars net profit on 

 the acre, and your land ready for the grass-crop. In an- 

 other Avay of calculating, five bushels of wheat go to a barrel 

 of flour, as is commonly said, though they really overgo : 

 and the farmer who raises thirty bushels of wheat on an 

 acre can have six barrels of prime flour worth, over the cost 

 of milling, thirty-six dollars : six hundred pounds of mid- 

 dlings and bran of the best quality, worth nine dollars ; and 



