22 MISOELLANEOTTS PAPERR. 



ever, if the garlic bulblets are present only in comparatively small 

 quantity (usually less than one-fourth of 1 per cent) it may pass as 

 No. 2 Red, depending largely on the other foreign substances present 

 and the amount of water in the grain. 



At present there are no available data showing definitely the extent 

 of the loss due to the presence of garlic in grain; but in wheat alone 

 tliis loss is known to be very great. In many sections the growing of 

 wheat has been almost wholly abandoned as a result of the reduced 

 price at which garlicky wheat must be sold. An annual loss of 

 $1,500,000 is undoubtedly a very conservative figure. It has been 

 estimated by members of the Chamber of Commerce of Baltimore that 

 60 per cent of the wheat grown in that section of the United States 

 contains more or less garlic. The three States in which garlic does 

 the greatest injury to the wheat crop are Maryland, Virginia, and 

 Tennessee. The average yield of wheat from these three States 

 during the five years from 1900 to 1904, inclusive, was just short of 

 29,000,000 bushels. Allowing that 50 per cent of this wheat contains 

 garlic, we have 14,500,000 bushels of garlicky wheat in these three 

 States alone. But granting that only one-half of this amount con- 

 tains garlic in sufficient quantity to throw it out of grade, we still 

 have 7,250,000 bushels of wheat which must be sold at a greatly 

 reduced price. A reduction of only 15 cents per bushel means more 

 than a million dollars annually to the farmers of Maryland, Virginia, 

 and Tennessee. The members of a prominent firm of grain exporters 

 in Baltimore state that the depreciation for the Maryland crop alone, 

 which amounts to about 12,000,000 bushels annually, will be fully 5 

 to 10 cents per bushel, or an equivalent of $600,000 to $1,200,000. A 

 large quantity of garlicky wheat, however, does not get into the ele- 

 vators, being fit only for feeding purposes. Mr. R. L. Wells" states 

 that, in Tennessee, wheat containing garlic bulblets has been sold as 

 low as 15 cents per bushel to feed stock. 



EXPERIMENTS IN SEPARATING GARLIC FROM WHEAT. 



The presence of the aerial bulblets of wild garlic in wheat has always 

 been objectionable, principally because of the extreme difficulty of 

 separating them from the wheat. While some of the lighter, imma- 

 ture bulblets can be blown out b}^ a good fanning mill, the greater 

 number are of practically the same size and weight as the wheat ker- 

 nels. Plate I shows wheat kernels and the aerial bulblets of wild gar- 

 lic of natural size. This similarity in size and shape makes it impos- 

 sible to separate them during the autumn or early winter by the use of 

 the ordinary cleaning machinery usually found in the majority of flour 

 mills and elevators, i. e., by screening and fanning. If the bulblets 



a The Wild Onion, Bulletin, Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station, July, 1895. 

 100— III 



