Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1877 — Growing Wheat. [ARTICLE]

Growing Wheat.

It would seem sensible, and only so, that a man who engages in farming and undertakes wheat-growing as his chief specialty, that he would undertake it only under the best methods And rules known anywhere in the world. Wheat-growing is regarded with great favor by all of the farmers in the great Northwest, and they would as soon cease trying to live as to cease wheat-growing. Not that is sir very profitable, taking one year with another, but because it always brings the cash when offered in any, market of the country. English farmers, with their more thorough cultivation of this cereal, get a far greater yield per acre than we do. Labor there is not as costly as with us, but the commercial fertilizers which are there employed without stint, are as expensive as the same articles are here. With our improved machinery we ought to glow wheat as cheaply as the English farmer does, and we ought not to be satisfied with a less yield per acre The constant variaticn in the special characteristics of the different varieties of wheat, and the substitution of new sorts for old, render the supposition possible that if the present system of culture is continued, with no change, we may'find ourselves destitute, at some time, of a profitable variety. A variety rapidly deteriorates when grown on the same farm under the conditions we so generally follow. We do not furnish enough of the elements of starch, of gluten or of oily matters of the grain. And year after year the vitality of the kernel grows less anti less. The English wheats are not so prone to change. It is not the straw that grows less as we grow the same sort from year to year, but the grain; and its quality, too, is constantly changing. The same degenerating tendency is observed in potatoes. When our lands were new we heard little of tendency of wheat to grow poorer; and it is only lately that we have been forced to give up old sorts for new. The best fine flour contains seventy pounds of starch in every 100; ten or twelve pounds of gluten; six to eight pounds of sugar, and the balance water and a little oil. Wheat in the bury contains about fifty to seventy per cent, of starch, ten to twenty percent, of gluten, and three to five per cent, of fatty matter. The oil lies near the skin aa well as the larger part of the gluten. "•It is evident that our lands are not rich enough any longer in these rare elements of the grain of wheat, and hence the constant degeneracy which we witness.—Detroit Tribune. /