Grain trade
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GRAIN TRADE: The complexity of the conditions of life in the 20th century may be well illustrated from the grain trade of the world. The ordinary bread sold in Great Britain represents, for example, produce of nearly every country in the world outside the tropics.
Wheat has been cultivated from remote antiquity. In a wild state it is practically unknown. It is alleged to have been found growing wild between the Euphrates and the Tigris; but the discovery has never been authenticated, and unless the plant be sedulously cared for, the species dies out in a surprisingly short space of time. Early 20th century experiments in cross-fertilization in Lancashire by the Garton Brothers have evolved the most extraordinary sports, showing, it is claimed, that the plant has probably passed through stages of which until the present day there had been no conception. The tales that grains of wheat found in the cerements of Egyptian mummies have been planted and come to maturity are no longer credited, for the vital principle in the wheat berry is extremely evanescent; indeed, it is doubtful whether wheat twenty years old is capable of reproduction. The Garton artificial fertilization experiments have shown endless deviations from the ordinary type, ranging from minute seeds with a closely adhering husk to big berries almost as large as sloes and about as worthless. It is conjectured that the wheat plant, as now known, is a degenerate form of something much finer which flourished thousands of years ago, and that possibly it may be restored to its pristine excellence, yielding an increase twice or thrice as large as it now does, thus postponing to a distant period the famine doom prophesied by Sir W. Crookes in his presidential address to the British Association in 1898.
The farmers of the United States have met a greatly increased output from Canada, the cost of transport from that country to England being much the same as from the United States in the 20th century. So much improved is the position of the farmer in North America compared with what it was about 1870, that the transport companies in 1901 carried 173/4 bushels of his grain to the seaboard in exchange for the value of one bushel, whereas in 1867 he had to give up one bushel in every six in return for the service.
As regards with the British farmer, it does not appear as if he had improved his position; for he has to send his wheat to greater distances, owing to the collapse of many country millers or their removal to the seaboard, while railway rates have fallen only to a very small extent; again the farmers wheat is worth only half of what it was formerly; it may be said that the British farmer has to give up one bushel in nine to the railway company for the purpose of transportation, whereas in the seventies he gave up one in eighteen only. Enough has been said to prove that the advantage of position claimed for the British farmer by Caird was somewhat illusory. Speaking broadly, the Kansas or Minnesota farmers wheat does not have to pay for carriage to Liverpool more than 25. 6d. to 7s. 6d. per ton in excess of the rate paid by a Yorkshire.farmer; this, it will be admitted, does not go very far towards enabling the latter to pay rent, tithes and rates and taxes.
In the raising of the standard of farming to an English level the volume of the worlds crop would be trebled, another fact which Sir William Ciookes seems to have overlooked. The experiments of the late Sir J. B. Lawes in Hertfordshire have proved that the natural fruitfulness of the wheat plant can be increased threefold by the application of the proper fertilizer.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
