WHEAT 123 



LARGE SIZE OF FARMS 



Wheat farming on the Pacific coast is remark- 

 able for the gigantic scale in which it is carried 

 on. It is not uncommon for a single farmer to 

 grow several thousand acres of wheat each 

 year. Some of the larger farms exceed 5,000 acres 

 in area. In 1907, R. C. McCroskey, near Gar- 

 field, Washington, in the famous Palouse country, 

 harvested and threshed 46,000 bushels of wheat 

 from a single field of 1,000 acres. This is said to 

 be the largest crop of wheat ever grown in one 

 field. While Washington has some of the 

 largest wheat farms in the world, the very large 

 farms are the exception, the average wheat farms 

 ranging in size from 160 to 640 acres. In the other 

 Pacific slope states the farms average less in 

 area than in Washington. 



METHODS IN FARMING 



Wheat raising on the Pacific coast is carried 

 on almost entirely by dry farming methods. 

 Irrigation is practiced to some extent in Idaho 

 and California, but when compared with the dry 

 farming area the acreage is very small. Wheat 

 is grown continuously on the same land, little 

 or no rotation of crops being practiced in the 

 wheat growing sections, but the usual method 

 now coming into practice is to summer fallow the 

 land about every third year. 



Extensive farming and continuous grain crop- 

 ping have exhausted the rather limited supply of 

 nitrogen and organic matter originally contained 

 in most of these semi-arid soils. The result is 



