390 EVENING DISCOUESES; 



last few years wliich raise the produce per acre of Eastern County farms by 

 at least 10 per cent. 



For aU its vigour, wheat cannot stand the competition uf weeds. At Rotham- 

 sted a crop was left unharvested to sow itself without cultivation. In three 

 years the wheat had entirely disappeared in the wilderness that grew up. 



Nevertheless, wheat has, more than any other cultivated plant, the capacity 

 of growing upon all sorts of soils, even the poorest. At Rothamsted, on one 

 of the plots, wheat has now been grown for seventy-seven successive years 

 without any manure, and it still yields about twelve bushels to the acre, pretty 

 much the average crop of all the wheat lands of the world. Wheat is the 

 crop for breaking in the wilderness. In the new countries the settler always 

 begins with a succession of wheat crops before he resorts to mixed farming. 



Experiments have long since settled what manures wheat wants. The real 

 trouble now is to get the big crops grown with plenty of manure to stand up, 

 and this is a problem now being attacked in various fashions — stiffer-strawed 

 varieties, special cultivation, and con'ective manures, etc. 



The wheat plant practically finishes growing a month or five weeks before 

 it is harvested. In the last period the valuable material is being moved from 

 stem and leaves to the seed. The migration is incomplete; half or less of 

 the stuff manufactured by the plant gets into the seed, and here are great 

 possibilities of improvement. 



The object of the modern flour miller is not to grind wheat into a meal 

 and then sift out the Hour, but to crack the berry without breaking the husk 

 (bran) and let the endosperm fall out. The best white flour is pure endosperm. 

 It is the most digestible part of the grain, and weight for weight yields the 

 most food. In peace times only two-thirds of the grain is recovered as floiu', 

 but under war conditions it was necessary to use the less digestible portions 

 as well, and the extraction was raised from 68 to well over 90 per cent. Though 

 imperfectly digested and not suited to all constitutions, the higher extraction 

 was equivalent to an extra two months' supply of wheat. 



Flour from most English wheats produces small dense loaves; certain Canadian 

 and other foreign wheats give big spongy loaves, which the pwblic prefer. A 

 wheat was found that retains this property of strength in the English climate. 

 This wheat crops badly, but the wheat-breeder is at work combining the strength 

 of this iFife wheat with the cropping power of English wheats. Professor 

 Biffen's ' Yeoman' wheat, on suitable soils, is now the biggest cropper known, 

 and gives flour as strong as Canadian wheat 



Before the war we only gi-ew one-fifth of the wheat we ate ; the rest came 

 from North and South America, Russia, India, and Australia. Some of these 

 foreign supplies have been cut off, and the world's supply of wheat will be short 

 for years to cfme. As a national insurance we must grow more at home, 

 and this can only ibe done by better skill and more knowledge, because we cannot 

 expand our land indefinitely. We must not grudge expenditure on knowledge; 

 our food supply in the future depends upon the advancement of science, which 

 is the purpose of the British Association. 



