Crops All Over the World To-day.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 57, 7 March 1936, Page 3 (Supplement)

Crops All Over the World To-day.

YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY. Alany pictures remain to us of the ancient Egyptian ploughs, which were made of wood and could only scratch soft ground to a depth of 2in or 3in. Yet it is but a little more than a century ago that this kind of plough was in use in parts of Europe. Bolivia, although backward in the matter of agriculture, is capable of producing excellent crops. Probabiy this is best accounted for by the fact that the Indians there knew 110 other instrument than a wooden spade—a sharpened stake such as primitive man might have used several thousands of years a<;o. In parts of Palestine, even to-day, pne may see oxen walking the threshing floor to separate the grain from the ear. Much is being done in India to help the farmer reap a better harvest, but for the most part he is content with a little a-nd does not like adopting new ideas which he distrusts. Every village in Katiawar, a province in the Bombay Presidency, has its own grain yard where the harvest of the whole village is collected. After the threshing, grain and chaff are separated by people standing on high stools, who pour the grain from containers on to the ground, the chaff being blown away in the wind. In Greece the threshing of the harvest involves two separate opera-

tions. In the first place the corn is tossed, into the air by means of a large, clumsy fork. This separates the grain from the ears, although the husks or chaff yet remain before it is ready to grind into flour. As in many other Eastern countries, changes come but slowly in China, where rice is still threshed by piling it on to a stone platform, where it is rolled by a boy who works a crude wooden roller backwards 'nad forwards. Another method, equally as monotonous, is to sift the grain through a large wicker sieve. Borneo, the land of perpetual summer, is so fertile that as soon as the jungle has been burnt off seed is planted by prodding the earth with a stick. Nearer the coast, where rice is grown, crude wooden ploughs are used by the natives to till the soil.

MAN'S OLDEST INDUSTRY.

Ploughing, sowing, harrowing and harvesting has been the story of the seasons since man first began to grow his food instead of collecting it where he found it wild fruits, berries and nuts and such animals as he could kill. The man who first discovered that he could grow food—probably a grain not unlike the wheat as we know it to-day—sowed the seed of all civilisations. It is extremely interesting to find that in many parts of the world man is still ploughing and harvesting with implements but little less primitive than those his far-off ancestors used.

! What a contrast all this is to the methods employed in civilised countries to-day where huge areas of llat prairie land, not measured in acres but in square miles, are cultivated and sown, almost entirely by mechanical means. In California there is a wheat field of 25,000 acres, or about 40 square miles, on the bank of the San Joaquin River, in the Madeira country. A man and a horse would take 30 years to plough and plant such a field, but by employing 200 men using modern machinery the whole work of sowing is done in about three weeks. A very interesting demonstration of the use of motors in harvesting was given, not so very long ago, in England. An acre of standing corn was marked out, cut, bound and threshed' by motor-driven machines. At half-past

eleven in the morning the tractor took the threshing > drum into the cornfield, and at twenty to twelve began to draw two harvesters. Men walking behind formed the sheaves into stooks, and in exactly fifteen minutes the acre had been cut. By one o'clock the corn was lying beside the threshing drum, and as the corn was threshed part of the grain was ground in the mill, worked by a ! pulley off the threshing drum. The flour was hurried to the house, and at half-past three loaves made from corn which four hours earlier had been standing wheat were taken out of the oven. The nineteenth century, with its advances in invention and science, brought more than these laboursaving devices. Came too tfie knowledge that enabled men by "crossfertilisation" to increase the output of the world more than tenfold. An Englishman named John Garton will ever be rememberd as the man who has made two ears of corn grow where only one grew before. To give one example, he crossed the highlydeveloped English, oat with the wild seed brought from China.' The result was surprising; A single head of this new oat held very nearly 1000 grains —ten times as many as .were previously found in the best crops. Truly a field of wheat may look the same as a field of wheat a thousand years ago, 1 but its productive value has been increased a hundred fold.