The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1901-11-16
Kansas the Banner State.
drank NJ. Todd in Ainslee's.)

| scale OF great manufactures, WIN ula-
| chinery and processes analogous to those
employed in some such work as the pro-
duction of steel. A distinctly Northern
crop now. wheat finds it's most congenial
| soil in the Upper Mississippi Valley,
| where it Is at one end of great trans
| portation route, the other end of which is
| Liverpool From the time it's green spears
pierce the ground, its road lies plain be-
| fore it. And had the great lakes not
| been there it would almost have had TO
cut itself channel, as their waters did.
| to the sea.
Minnesota produced last year 81 ,509,-
| 252 bushels of wheat. South Dakota, lying
| just beyond, produced 20,149,6S4, and
North Dakota 13.166599. The banner
/ State, however was Kansas. They never
do things by halves in Kansas, and the
! yield of wheat last year was so, 4SS, 655.
! Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio are
| all heavy wheat growers, and lie within
! striking distance of the great Northeast
| ern wheat route.
Throughout the major part oil this
| section the growing of wheat is conduct
| ed AS though it were the chief end of
| man, and the mere handling, selling and
shipping of it have provided life occupa
| lions for hundreds of thousands of the
ablest and keenest of American business
men. The canal at the Sault Cainte Ma
RE, known popularity as "the Soo.' car
ries in eight months two and a half
times the traffic of the Suez Canal in a
year. and the largest item of it is wheat.
| con the great ranches OF Minnesota and
| the Dakotas, ranches ranging in size into
| the tens of thousands of acres, the hard
| spring wheat is grown, the kind that,
| milled into the best bread -four in the
world, with the possible exception of the
| Russian, has made Minneapolis famous
| Here are conducted those Titanic labors
known in the picturesques American YER
nacular as bonanza farming the dream
of whose promoters it has been to en-
| ploy machinery and shortcut processes
| on such a scale that the farming of 64n
acres year should come TO represent
| the work of one man.
| ut has been said that this ic tie age
of the agricultural enterpreEeur ard
nothing illustrates the statement better
than the modes Of management OF some of
| these great Northwestern wheat farms.
| Ten thousand acres is a common size.
On such q dukedom a farmer will koep
ers and hundreds of cattle anG horses.
| Flowing is done with gang Dlows that
make 'swaths instead of single burrows
Seeding is done by machinery. loaping
and threshing are similarly accomplish
ed. The scattered farm buildings are
connected by telephone, and 50 are the
neighboring ranches, and the ranenes
with the nearest town. Generally, there
are sour tracks on the land land a pri-
vate elevator where the grain can await
the right price, which it's owner learns
by private wire instead of taking the
travelling buyers word for it. When the
wheat is finally moved to some lake port
it will be loaded by machinery that can
handle a thousand bushels a minute and
started on its journey to Europe on a
vessel that can carry the yield of over
$4,000 acres of land in one gigantic car
go.
at has not been in. this Upper Mississ-
ippi region however, that mechanical de-
velopments in wheat production have
reached their greatest height. The heavy
dewfall and wetness of the standing grain
have prevented the use of the most eff
cient type of harvesting machinery and
confined the farmer to the sort that does
the work of reaping and threshing in de-
tached operations, and by the application
of power in comparatively small quanti-
ties. On the Pacific Coast are great
wheat producing stretches where the dry
ness of the atmosphere in harvest time
makes possible the use of yet more ire
mendous machinery, and gives to wheat
growing an even more spectacular and
dramatic effect than it can ever have in
the humid regions of the Middle North.
"In the Sacramento and San Joaquin
valleys Of California and in the favored
territory in Eastern Oregon and Wash
ington, and Western Idaho, called by it's
denizens the Inland Empire where the
Cascade Mountains make a barrier
against the moisture laden winds of the
Pacific, standing grain is so dry by nine
o'clock in the harvest time, that it can be
headed or reaped, threshed, cleaned and
sacked, all in one machine, which is
drawn over the field by a small herd of
horses, or goes through harnessed to a
steam traction engine powerful enough
to haul train, of freight cars. Illustra-
tions with this article show such ma
chinery in operation on a California
wheat ranch in the San Joaquin Valley.
Machinery of that sort goes with the
largest kind of farming. One of the Sa-
cramento Valley ranches contained at one
time $4,000 acres, all in wheat, which
was cut, threshed, wnnowed and sacked
by machines that cleaned it off at the
rate of sixty acres day apiece
''In this country wheat is broadly class
flied in three varieties, the hard, the soft
and the durums. The hard wheat makes
the bread flour milled in the North 1t
is a Northern product. The soft wheat
mkaes cracker flour and is milled large
~ in st. Louis. The durums are the ma
caroni wheats, and are the only kind
that do we'll very far South. Texas pro-
duced over 23,000,OoO bushels of wheat in
1906 good part of it of the durum varie-
ties.
.The United States grow more wheat
than Asia. Africa and South America