Farm and Fireside, 1916, Vol. 39

Book excerpt: Excerpt from Farm and Fireside, 1916, Vol. 39: The National Farm Paper Wheat here in West Virginia may not yield a sufh cient crop to pay much above the cost of produc tion. Yet it occupies the soil at a time which, in the absence of other crops on the soil, would permit a waste of plant' food from leaching. Nitrogen, the most costly of all plant foods, is also the most easily wasted by leaching. The wheat crop can thus be used to save a waste of nitrogen during the fall and winter months. When the locality in which I live was first settled, the farmers could grow fairly good crops of wheat on freshly cleared lands, especially the hill lands that faced the south or southeast. They could not get such large yields as were obtained on the virgin soils of the West, but it was reasonable to expect a yield of from 12 to 20 bushels per acre of Well matured wheat. In the course of a few years, how ever, the wheat failed to fill well, though the straw was usually large enough. The farmer who would grow wheat must go into the forest and clear more land. Finally the wheat crop was almost -a complete failure. I feel safe in saying that the average yield of wheat here did not reach five bushels per acre and most of our farmers had quit trying to grow it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.