178 SCIENCE OF SUCCESSFUL, THRESHING 



the tailings is apt to be cracked by the cylinder, and when 

 the tailings are heavy this is sometimes of importance. If 

 very much chaff is returned it increases the difficulties of 

 separation, and must be handled by the sieves again. In 

 all cases have as few tailings as possible. 



The Waste in Threshing. There is not a machine built 

 at the present time that will save every kernel in all kinds 

 and conditions of grain. The Case will separate the grain 

 from the straw better than any machine made, but to ac- 

 complish the best results it must be properly operated. 

 When one detects a machine wasting grain, he usually 

 imagines that the quantity wasted amounts to many times 

 more than it actually does. If a stream of wheat as large 

 as that which runs out of a grain-drill tooth were discov- 

 ered going into the straw the farmer would probably say 

 that the machine was wasting half the grain. Yet he 

 knows that he must drive very fast to get a bushel and a 

 half of wheat through each grain drill tooth in a day. 

 Roughly speaking, there are 600 handfuls or a million ker- 

 nels of wheat in a bushel.* This amount wasted in ten 

 hours indicates that a handful or 1700 kernels is being 

 wasted every minute. If farmers realized the economy of 

 finishing a job as quickly as possible, irrespective of the 



In the "Thresher World" contest of August, 1903, the bushel 

 of wheat was actually counted and found to contain 869,762 ker- 

 nels. In the "Canadian Thresherman" contest of 1908, fifteen 

 pounds of No. 1 Northern wheat were found to contain 257,885 ker- 

 nels, or at the rate of 1,031,540 kernels per bushel. In the 1909 

 "Canadian Thresherman" contest the No. 2 Northern wheat counted 

 showed the number of kernels per bushel to be 1,003,089. 



