39G Wheat and Wheat Culture. [September, 



WHEAT AND WHEAT CULTURE. 



That a more thorougli and improved cultivation of this princely 

 cereal should be urged upon our farmers must be universally conceded 

 of paramount importance. In an economical point of view this 

 crop with Indian corn may be regarded as our first staples. Let but 

 a single wheat crop fail and our merchants are bankrupt and the 

 people are without bread. Any measure or mode of culture which 

 in its adoption will increase this staple crop but a single bushel to 

 the general average per acre would be of immense national impor- 

 tance. And that this amount may be realized by information now 

 in possession of many of our farmers if adopted, we have no manner 

 of doubt. America is capable of becoming the granary of the world 

 with a greatly increased population over the present. The extent of 

 the wheat districts of this continent are literally boundless ; the 

 greater portion of which still await the hand of man to bring them 

 into cultivation. The valleys of the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio 

 alone, if brought into cultivation, are probably capable of supporting 

 a population equal to one-half of all the inhabitants of the world ; 

 and in the southern hemisphere there are boundless tracts of land 

 where the climate and soil are all that can be desired for growing wheat 

 of the finest quality. Although probably indigeneous to the more 

 temperate climate, wheat like man, which it was evidently designed 

 to feed, is a cosmopolitan and lives through the severest winters of 

 the north of Europe while on the other hand it thrives under the 

 burning suns of the torrid zones. Its habital is by far wider and 

 more extensive than that of any other cereal, a palpable proof that 

 it was intended by infinite wisdom to form the principal and peculiar 

 bread-food — the staff of life — of the human race. This is more fully 

 confirmed by the fact that few animals relish wheat in any form and 

 invariably prefer oats or barley if a choice be given them, and these 

 latter grains when used as the principal food of man are accompa- 

 nied by effects highly detrimental to health. Such being the impor- 

 tance of this cereal, and such a patrimony being ours for its produc- 

 tion it becomes us as a nation to husband them, and as political 

 economists to guard well against the improvident waste and exhaus- 

 tion of the soil which produces, and so cultivate as that quantity and 

 quality of yield, shall everywhere and in all respects be improved. 



