Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1898 — OUR BIGGEST WHEAT YIELD. [ARTICLE]

OUR BIGGEST WHEAT YIELD.

Thia Tear’s Crop the Greatest in the Country’s History. With the return of our hosts from the field of battle, crowned with the laurels of victory, comes the joyous news that this year’s wheat crop will be the largest ever known in this country’s history. The yield for the year, on the most trustworthy authority, will be 750,000,000 bushels. Of this amount 400,000,000 is winter wheat and 350,000,000 bushels the spring crop now being gathered. The 1891 crop, which amounted to 611,780,000 bushels and was the largest yield heretofore, is thus easily eclipsed. These figures mean much to the farmer and the people generally of this country. In the first place, the great wheat crop represents a money value of $500,000,000 at ruling prices where the wheat is found. One-third of the wheat crop of the whole world is raised this year in Uncle Sam’s domain. The productive country that has grown this wheat extends from ocean to ocean and from the latitude of southern Texas to the Canadian border. Most of the crop comes from the broad prairies Of the Mississippi valley, and about 130,000,000 bushels of it from the two Dakotas, whose principal product is wheat. The product in these States is about twice what it was last year, for one reason because there is an increase of about 20 per cent in acreage. Busy scenes are now being enacted in these new States, where farms are measured by the thousands of acres, and where wheat raising is carried on on a scale known nowhere else in the world. For mile after mile about the frequent railway stations are vast fields where grain stands three feet high, and at the stations the jonspicuous buildings are the large elevators ready to receive the crop. At many of these railway tow-ns there are enough elevators to supply each half dozen inhabitants with one. The Dakota people are learning, and learning much, from Russian farmers who are settling in the States, and who understand little else than wheat raising. They are learning how to cultivate wheat at less expense than formerly, and how to hold their grain for a paying market. The entire Northwest has fortunately been free from devastating storms during the growing season, and this great factor, added to increased acreage and better farming, has brought a state of affairs which precludes all thought of the “starving farmers,” of whom we heard so much a few years ago. These same farmers are happy now. They are independent, because prosperous. They are becoming capitalists. They are no longer paying 12 and 20 per cent for money, but are paying 6 per cent, so as to have money to buy more land on which to raise big wheat crops.