The St. Johns herald., 1896-01-11
WHEAT CONSUMPTION.
The Average Amount Allotted to Each Individual Per Annum-
Estimates Based Upon Crop Xieids E@- ports and Population for Q Period Of Twenty-Five Fears-A
 Close Calculation.

The average annual consumption of wheat per capita in the United States has been officially estimated at 4.o7 bushels, and this quantity was used for several years in the compilation of statements by the agricultural bureau at Washington. The disagreement in recent years between the quantities or wheat oa hand and what they would have been if this estimate and those TOT crop production were correct has in- vited a recxamination of the data. This, says the Chicago Tribune, has been undertaken by MT. B. II. Snow, who reviewed all the official ngures available for the determination of the quantity consumed. He has tabulated the returns of actual food consumption in 1,G94 families, representing S,22o ln- dividuals of stated ages, and working at various employments in twenty four states, and the results arc com pared with the census statistics of flour production and export, taking 4SH pounds of four as the average product from bushel of wheat. He definitely adopts ATT l,ushels of wheat as the av- craze annual consumption per capita, which for a population ot 7O,oOO,OOO persons would give an aggregate an nual food consumption of SS4,oOO,OcO bushels of wheat.
 To this must be added the volume of exports in wheat and flour and the quantity used for seed, which varies with the breadth sown. If an allow ance of 30, ,O00, ,0Oo be made for the latter and l0. DOG, 900 for consumption as paste, etc. these, with the food consumption, will make 400, JOG, 900 bushels to be suo- tracted from the total crop yield, the remainder being the export surplus, without taking into account any wheat that is used for the feeding of live stock and poultry, of which great amount is said to have been done from the crop of 1894. But 40o,0OO,OOO dl- vided by 10000, 900 gives unit con- sumption of about 5.7 bushels for all domestic purposes, and this result IS nearly half bushel per capita more than the 5.2l1 bushels which was stated n few years ago to have been deduced from a close comparison of reported crop yield, exports and population through a series of twenty-two years.
 This difference is not necessarily the result of important error in either set of figures. The long period for which an average was taken was one during which the per capita consumption of wheat must have largely increased among the poorer people of the southern states, who hardly knew what wheat bread was till after the close of the war. Probably there has been some increase in the north, but this may not have been more than sufficient to offset the greater yield of flour obtainable from wheat by modern milling as compared with the old-fashioncd grinding proc css. And undoubtedly the per capita consumption now varies from year to wear. The excess of milling product over exports of flour in 1880 left per capita of 5. 5S bushels of wheat for home consumption, while the corresponding result for 1890 was only 5.2S bushels per capita. These figures do not take into account the difference in flour stocks at the two ends of the year, but there is no evidence of any marked ac- emulation during either of the two years to greatly. change the per capita figures.
 The one important deduction to be made from the comparison is that what ever error may have been made in esti- mating quantities left over at the end of each of few recent crop years must be ascribed to looseness of the data from which were compiled the esti- mates of crop yield. It seems probable that for each of the last three or four crops there was an average underesti' mate of 10000, 900 or 50,oo0,0oo bushels, while there was much smaller under estimate of domestic consumption.