Agricultural

Western Star, Issue 374, 21 August 1880, Page 9 (Supplement)

Agricultural

COMPARISON OF ANCIENT AND MODERN FARMING. A writer in the Occident compares the result of ancient and modem farming. He says that, according to the Bible, the annual yield of wheat in Palestine varied from thirty to one hundredfold. But the average in California is only twelvefold. We quote as follows : The Jews, in our Saviour’s time, had no wheat drills and no gang-plows. They scratched the soil with a wooden plow and sowed broadcast. They had no guano or phosphates, or fertilizers of any kind. How is it then that we, in a soil that has been cultivated twenty or thirty years in a climate very similar to theirs, and with all our boasted improvements in agriculture, cannot raise as much per acre as they did ? The problem for our farmers to work out is how to get larger crops from smaller farms. We have a great many suggestions in books and newspapers on this subject; and there is ever and anon some new variety of seed or some new farming implement in the market, vhich, it is said, will double or treble the yield. Yet, with all our science and our inventive genius, we don’t get above the average. We raise immense crops, but in order to do so we plow a great many acres and sow a great deal of seed. Just think of the saving of seed if we can raise 3,000 bushels on fifty acres instead of three hundred. That saving'this year in wheat would amount to nearly 30odol. Add to this the saving in taxes, in labor and the feed of horses, and I am satisfied that the farmer who could get the crop from fifty acres that he gets from three hundred would save i.ooodol. a year, and the saving would support his family. A man, I have forgotten his name, stated in the papers two years ago that he had raised ah immense crop of wheat by planting it in the hills as we plant corn and cultivating it. He saved two-thirds of his seed and doubled the yield per acre. A single grain of wheat, if it has room enough and is in good soil, will shoot out, i. e,, send up from six to twenty stalks. If each stalk has a full head, that stalk will contain from thirty to sixty grains. Hence, the one grain is capable of yielding from one hundred and eighty to one thousand two hundred grains of wheat. But every crop takes something from the soil, and the same crop year after year will in time exhaust the soil. This result we can prevent, or at least delay, by pasturing or summerfallowing the land every other year, or by a rotation of crops. But a better way still is to analyze the soil. See what it is deficient in and supply the lack. Take a wheat field ; it may have nine-tenths of the elements necessary to produce a crop, and the one element that is wanting might be easi'y and cheaply supplied, if we know just what it is.