T. B. Wood

“ Incidentally I have pointed out the difficulties which vi pursue any investigation which involves the cultivation on the large scale of such a crop as wheat, and the consequent need of adopting due precautions to ensure accuracy before making recommendations to the farmer. Advice based on insufficient evidence is more than likely to be misleading. Every piece of misleading advice is a definite handicap to the progress of agricultural science. ”

“ These are by no means all the handicaps of the farmer who would market his corn to the best advantage. Even the man who is blessed with plenty of ready money, and can abide his own time for selling his wheat, is hampered by the cumbrous weights and measures in use in this country, and above all by their lack of uniformity. In East Anglia wheat is sold by the coomb of four bushels. ”

“ The world’s demand for nitrogenous manure is therefore certain to increase. Such considerations as these inspired Sir William Crookes’ Presidential address to the British Association in 1898, in which he foretold the probability of a nitrogen famine, and explained how it must lead to a shortage in the world’s wheat supply. The remedy he suggested was the utilization of water-power to 6 provide the energy for generating electricity, by means of which the free nitrogen of the air should be brought into combination in such forms that it could be used for manure. ”

“ No soil is so uniform that an experimenter can guarantee that each of the varieties he is trying has the same chance of making a good yield as far as soil is concerned. It is a matter of common knowledge too that every crop of wheat is more or less affected by insect and fungoid pests, whose injuries are unlikely to fall equally on each of the varieties in any variety test. Many other causes of variation, such as unequal distribution of manure, inequalities in previous cropping of the land, irregular damage by birds, may well interfere with the reliability of such field tests. ”

“ After seven years of investigation the author has worked out the following theory of the strength of wheat flours, which has finally enabled him to devise a method which promises to be both accurate and rapid, and to require so little flour that it can readily be used by the wheat breeder to determine the strength of the grain in a single ear. It has already been mentioned that a strong wheat is one that will make a large loaf of good shape and texture. The strength of a wheat may therefore be defined as the power of making a large loaf of good shape and texture. ”

“ Perhaps the first impression which a visitor to a modern roller mill would receive is the great extent to which mechanical contrivances have replaced hand labour. Once the wheat has been delivered at the mill it is not moved again by hand until it goes away as flour and offals. It is carried along by rapidly moving belts, elevated by endless chains carrying buckets, allowed to fall again by 80 gravity, or perhaps in other cases transported by air currents. Another very striking development is the great care expended in cleaning the grain before it is ground. ”

“ In the last chapter we have followed the growing of the wheat from seed time to harvest. But when the farmer has harvested his corn his troubles are by no means over. He has still to thrash it, dress it, sell it, and deliver it to the mill or to the railway station. In the good old times a hundred years ago thrashing was done by the flail, and found work during the winter for many skilled labourers. This time-consuming method has long disappeared. In this country all the corn is now thrashed by machines, driven as a rule by steam, but still in some places by horse-gearing. ”

“ A little consideration will show that the sale of bread could only be put on a more scientific basis by the exercise of an enormous amount of trouble, and the employment of a very numerous and expensive staff. No doubt the ideally perfect way of regulating the sale of either bread or any other feeding stuff would be to enact that it should be sold by weight, and that the seller should be compelled to state the percentage composition, so that the buyer could calculate the price he was asked to pay per unit of actual foodstuff. ”

“ It is now too late in the season to sow wheat. The land is ploughed, but the ploughing is only a shallow one, so that the water stored in the deeper layers of the soil which have been solidified by the trampling of the sheep may not be disturbed. The surface soil turned up by the plough is pulverised by harrowing until a fine seed-bed is obtained, and barley is sown early in the spring. Clover and grass seeds are sown amongst the barley, so that they may take firm root whilst the barley is growing and ripening. The barley is harvested in the autumn. ”

“ But the discovery that Red Fife would produce strong wheat in England by no means solved the problem, for when the Home Grown Wheat Committee distributed seed of their pure strain of that variety for extended testing throughout the country, it was soon found to be only a poor yielder except in a few districts. A yield of three quarters of strong grain, even if it makes 40s. per quarter on the market, only gives to the farmer a return of £6 per acre, as compared with a return of nearly £8 from 41⁄2 quarters of weak grain worth 35s. ”

“ In other words the baker cannot have the weight of the loaves he sells under complete control. Furthermore the loss in weight when a loaf gets dry by evaporation is due entirely to loss of water, and does not decrease the amount of actual foodstuff in the loaf. To sell bread in loaves guaranteed to contain a definite weight of actual foodstuff might be justified scientifically, but practically it would entail so great an expense for the salaries of the inspectors and analysts required to enforce such a regulation that the idea is quite out of the question. ”

“ But unfortunately it too often happens that the struggling farmer cannot have a free hand in marketing his corn. In many cases he must sell at once 17 after harvest to raise the necessary cash to buy stock for the winter’s feeding. This causes a glut of wheat on the market in the early autumn, and the price at once drops. In other cases the farmer has bought on credit last winter’s feeding stuffs, or last spring’s manures, and is bound to sell his wheat to the merchant in whose debt he finds himself, and to take the best price offered in a non-competitive market. ”

“ It follows, therefore, that to obtain enough of these latter acids a man feeding only on wheat products would have to eat a quantity of bread which would supply a great excess of the more abundant glutaminic acid, which would go to waste with the evil results already outlined. From this point of view it appears that bread should not form more than a certain proportion of the diet, and that the rest of the diet should consist of foods which contain proteins yielding on digestion little glutaminic acid and much of the other amino-acids in which the protein of wheat is deficient. ”

“ To balance a stone weighing over half a ton so that, when revolving at a high rate of speed, it may be separated from its partner at no point over its entire surface of about 12 square feet by more than the thickness of the skin of a grain of wheat, and yet may nowhere come into actual contact, 76 is an achievement of no mean order. ”

“ The system of wheat-growing above described is an intensive one. The cultivation is thorough, the soil is kept in good condition by manuring, or by the use of purchased feeding stuffs, and the cost of production is comparatively high. Such systems of intensive culture prevail in the more densely populated countries, but the bulk of the world’s wheat supply is grown in thinly populated countries, where the methods of cultivation are extensive. Wheat is sown year after year on the same land, no manure is used, and tillage is reduced to a minimum. ”

“ Thus the percentage of fat in any kind of bread is on the whole a very fair indication of the amount of germ which has been left in the flour from which the loaf was made. It is often contended nowadays that the germ contains an unknown constituent which plays an important part in nutrition, quite apart from its fuel-value. ”

“ In it he stated that plants could obtain from the air all the nitrogen they required, and that, to produce a full crop, it was only necessary to ensure that the soil should provide a sufficient supply of the mineral elements, as he called them, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, etc. Now of all the elements which the farmer has to buy for 4 application to his land as manure, nitrogen is the most costly. At the present time nitrogen in manures costs sevenpence per pound, whilst a pound of phosphorus in manures can be bought for fivepence, and a pound of potassium for twopence. ”

“ The fate of the germ in the process of roller milling is a point of considerable interest, both on account of the ingenious way in which it is removed, and because of the mysterious nutritive properties which it is commonly assumed to possess. The germ of a grain of wheat forms only about 11⁄2 per cent. by weight of the grain. It differs in composition from the rest of the grain, being far richer in protein, fat, and phosphorus. ”

“ It is the richness in nitrogen of the virgin soils of the Western States and Canada, and of the black soils of Russia, that forms one of the chief factors in their success as wheat-growing lands. It must be added, however, that continuous cropping without manure must in time exhaust the stores of nitrogen in even the richest soil, and when this time comes the farmers in these at present favoured regions will undoubtedly find wheat-growing more costly by whatever sum per acre they may find it necessary to expend in nitrogenous manure. ”

“ If a cereal meal devoid of gluten is mixed with water and yeast, fermentation will take place with formation of gas, but the gas will escape at once, and the product will be solid and not porous. Evidently from the baking point of view gluten is of the greatest importance. One of the most obvious methods that have been suggested for estimating the strength of wheat depends on the estimation of the 64 percentage of gluten contained in the flour. The method has not turned out very successfully, for strength seems to depend rather on the quality than on the quantity of gluten in the wheat. ”

“ In the earlier chapters I have tried to give a brief sketch of the growing and marketing of wheat. If I have succeeded, the reader will realise that the farmer’s share in the production of the staple food of the people is by no means the simple affair it appears to be. The various operations of farming are so closely interdependent that even the most complex book-keeping may fail to disentangle the accounts so as to decide with certainty whether or not any innovation is profitable. ”

“ The process of kneading causes the particles of gluten to absorb water and to adhere to one another, so that the dough may be regarded as being composed of innumerable bubbles each surrounded by a thin film of gluten, in or between which lie the starch grains and other constituents of the flour. Each yeast cell as above explained forms a centre for the formation of carbon dioxide gas, which cannot escape at once into the air, and must therefore form a little bubble of gas inside the particular film of gluten which happens to surround it. ”

“ The only market for straw in quantity is a large town, and there is no considerable area of land suitable for wheat-growing near a sufficiently large town to provide a market for the large output of straw which would result from such a system of farming.
The ordinary practice of the British farmer is to grow his wheat in rotation with other crops. Various rotations are practised to suit the special circumstances of different districts, one might almost say of special farms. This short account of wheat-growing does not profess to give a complete account of even English farming practice. ”

“ Protein like starch, sugar, and fat contains the elements carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but it differs from them in containing also a large proportion of the element nitrogen, which may be regarded as its characteristic constituent. When digested in the stomach and intestine it is split into a large number of simpler substances known by chemists under the name of amino-acids. Every animal requires these amino-acids in certain proportions. From the mixture resulting from the digestion of the proteins in its diet the amino-acids are absorbed and utilised by the body in the proportions required. ”

“ But wheat contains also varying proportions of such salts as chlorides, sulphates and phosphates, which are soluble in water, and the action of such salts on gluten was next tried. It was at once found that these salts in the same concentration as they exist in the wheat grain were capable of making gluten coherent, but that the kind of coherence produced was peculiar to each salt. Phosphates produce a tough and elastic gluten such as is found in the strongest wheats. Chlorides and sulphates on the other hand make gluten hard and brittle, like the gluten of a very weak wheat (Fig. 12) . ”

“ No doubt this property of gluten has a certain indirect bearing on the nutritive value of bread by increasing its palatability. But gluten being a protein has a direct and special part to play in nutrition, which is perhaps best illustrated by following one step further the comparison between the animal body and a steam engine. It has been pointed out that starch, sugar, and fat play the same part in the body as does the fuel in a steam engine. But an engine cannot continue running very long on fuel alone. ”

“ The real food-value must therefore depend not on the total amount of foodstuff present but on the amount which is digestible. The proportion of protein which can be digested in the different kinds 125 of bread has been the subject of careful experiments in America, and lately in Cambridge. The method of experimenting is arduous and unpleasant. Several people must exist for a number of days on a diet consisting chiefly of the kind of bread under investigation, supplemented only by small quantities of food which are wholly digestible, such as milk, sugar and butter. ”