12 CEREALS 



Wheat straw in most countries is used for litter or is 

 useless, -but in India it has to become, as bhusa (chaff), 

 food for cattle. Hybridizers in many countries might do 

 worse than use some Indian varieties in an attempt to 

 impart to their wheats a straw which can be freely used 

 as cattle food, but it must not be forgotten that varieties 

 of great value in India may be useless elsewhere. And 

 the converse is true, for we find Howard saying that 

 " the introduction of exotic wheats into India has been 

 a long record of failure." Indeed, one is driven to the 

 conclusion that in countries where wheat has been grown 

 for centuries it is wise to esteem highly the empirical 

 knowledge acquired by generations of growers, and to 

 be slow in discarding existing methods of cultivation. 

 European methods have been tried in India and discarded; 

 it has been found, on most points of agricultural practice, 

 better to supplement and adapt rather than to discard 

 native customs in this connection. 



These considerations have a bearing on the choice of 

 varieties. For instance, threshing can best be done by 

 bullocks; the wheat must therefore be allowed to become 

 fully ripe, and as a consequence varieties are specially 

 wanted which will hold their grain with a minimum of 

 shedding when dead ripe. Nor must the breeder, in 

 attempting to stiffen the straw, overlook the fact that it 

 has to become food for cattle. Again, dung is used as 

 fuel; but in India nitrogen is a ''limiting factor" as to 

 yield, and farmyard manure appears to be the best 

 fertilizer which can be added to the soil; so the problem 

 on this point is to find a substitute for dung as fuel. The 

 native, however, discovered long ago that leguminous 

 plants acted as fertilizers, and it is a common practice 

 to grow leguminous plants in rotation or actually mixed 

 with wheat itself. In the Nanbada Valley, situated in 

 the tropics, it is customary to grow wheat year after year 

 without rotation, manure, or irrigation, but the natives 

 almost invariably mix a proportion of gram with the 

 wheat, and the soil appears to be more fertile now than 

 it was in 1864. Even the leguminous weeds which grow 

 freely in the wheat fields of the Punjab are credited with 

 improving the crops by means of the nitrogen which they 

 add to the soil. 



