The How and Why Library/Industries/Section I
WHEAT
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I. BIG BUSINESSES FROM LITTLE SEEDS
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What did you have for breakfast?
Bread and butter, toast, muffins, batter cakes. You had other things, too, but all of you had some kind of bread made of wheat flour. For dinner you will have crackers with your soup, and perhaps pie or cake. Those will be made of wheat flour, too. We use more wheat in America than any other kind of food. Everyone who lives here eats a barrel of flour every year. That is about ninety million barrels. It takes nearly five bushels of wheat to make a barrel of white flour. Four hundred and fifty million bushels of wheat! Yes, indeed! But we really grow about seven hundred million bushels. We have a great deal of wheat and flour to sell to countries across the ocean, where they cannot grow enough to feed all the people. Wheat is the bread of all white people. They use corn and rye and oats, too, but more wheat than all the others put together, The Chinese and Japanese and Filipinos and many other peoples eat more rice. But they are beginning to buy our white flour, too.
Where does all this wheat come from? Just farms. Little farms and big farms, in a great many of our states, grow wheat. These wheat fields cover fifty million acres of our land. Some wheat fields are so big that a hundred men go into them at once. They ride on sulky plows drawn by horses, or they use steam plows. Then they go over the fields again with steel-toothed harrows to break up the clods. They follow the harrows with drill seeders that drop the seed through pipes in rows. Behind each pipe is a little plow like a garden trowel, that covers the seed. In some parts of our country wheat is planted in the spring. In others, where winter is less severe, it is planted in the fall.
Did you ever get your name in a newspaper? You were proud to see your name in print. Our president gets his name in the paper very often. But no one, not even kings and queens, gets a column or so every day in all the big city papers in many countries and in many languages. Wheat does. Wheat is the bread of many people.They are anxious to know if bread is going to be cheap or dear. How much wheat is being planted? the world asks. But that doesn’t answer the question about bread, for many things may happen to wheat after it is in the ground.
How is the soil everywhere wheat grows? Is there enough rain? Or too much? Owners of railroads and ships are interested in the size of the next wheat crop, for they will have to carry the grain and flour across land and water. Owners of flour mills want to know how much they will have to grind, and what they will have to pay for it. Men who buy and sell wheat, owners of grain elevators who store wheat, bakers of bread and makers of breakfast foods and macaroni are interested, too. Village storekeepers are anxious to know if the farmers will have little money or a great deal to spend. Factories want to know how much goods to make, railroads how many grain cars they will need. Every farmer who grows wheat wants to know what other farmers are doing, and what his wheat will be worth. Wheat is so important that our government makes a crop report once a month. Corn and oats and other foods are put in, too, but wheat comes first.
From the fuss that is made about it, you would think the farmers were tucking precious babies into cradles when they put the little brown wheat seeds into the ground. Well, they are. The world wants to know every day how those seed babies are getting along. Wheat has as many troubles as human babies. In dry summers little chinch bugs feed on them. In cool, moist summers the tiny Hessian fly, only one-sixth inch long, lays eggs that hatch into little worms on them. Then there is the mildew and rust. In the spring, wheat needs rain of melting snow. At harvest time warm sunshine to dry the ripe grain.
Harvest time is exciting. Where do you think the excitement begins? Not in the wheat field where the grain is turning from green to gold, but in big city banks that may be a thousand miles away. The farmers must have a lot of money to pay men and machines to save the wheat. They go to the banks in the small towns where they trade, to borrow money. In a few weeks, when the wheat is sold, they can pay the money back. The little banks have to borrow money of the big city banks.
Come and see a big wheat farm in harvest time. It is a golden fleece as far as you can see. First come the reapers to shear the fleece. In the old days, and in many backward countries today,men cut wheat with scythes by hand. An American fastened a number of scythes or blades to a shaft and made a reaping machine that could cut as much wheat as many men. (See McCormick, page 1133.) The reaper not only cuts the wheat but gathers it in bundles with the heads all one way, and ties the bundles. It is really a reaper and binder. Men gather the bundles behind the reaper and stack them in shocks for the sun to dry the grain.
A few weeks later a big red threshing machine goes from farm to farm. It is run by steam, like a fire engine, and it makes the same chug-chugging noise. It stands in the middle of the field. One man runs the engine. Others bring the bundles, feed them to the thresher. The heads are torn off, and the straw showered out behind. The grains are shelled from the husk, the chaff blown out in a golden rain, and the wheat grains dropped below. In one day a big thresher can clean two thousand bushels of wheat. It takes a great many men to feed its clattering iron jaws, to pitch the straw back so the thresher will not be buried, and to catch the grain in bags or wagon beds. And you ought to see the harvesters eat! Farmer's wives and daughters have to work a week to get food enough for one day. A combined reaping and threshing machine is now made which cuts the wheat, threshes it and delivers the cleaned grain in sacks.
Then what happens? The wheat cannot lie on the ground, and no farmer can afford to have a great storage house that he would use only a few weeks. His nearest town on a railroad has one for all the farmers who trade in that town. This storage house is called a grain elevator. It stands beside the railway. It looks like a very tall barn with only a few windows near the top. Often it is covered with sheet iron so it will not easily catch fire. Some elevators are tall, round towers of steel and cement. They are built in groups, and roofed with iron.
In every town in a wheat-growing country there is an elevator and a grain buyer. How is the wheat taken from the low wagon bed and put into the elevator? Did you ever see a link belt? It is an iron chain made of broad links. On each link is a little square steel bucket that holds about a pint. The belt runs over a sprocket wheel at the top of the elevator. The little buckets dip into the wagon. Each one carries a tiny load of wheat up. In a few minutes the wheat is all lifted into a weighing bin at the top. When a load is weighed the wheat is dropped into the elevator tower.The grain buyer pays the farmer for the wheat, and the farmer pays the bank the money he borrowed and has a good deal left over. The grain buyer has to borrow money now, for he must buy the wheat as fast as it is brought in. He can pay his loan when he sells the wheat in big city markets, or to millers. He makes a few cents on every bushel, and the railroad makes something for hauling it. The banks make a little interest for loaning the money, The farmer begins to buy all sorts of things—clothes and food and furniture, and more farm machines. By and by all the wheat money is flowing into all kinds of businesses.
As the country elevators fill with wheat the grain buyers call on the railroads for cars to carry it away. The cars back up on the side track below the elevator. A long canvas pipe, as squirmy as an elephant's trunk, pokes its nose into a car and the wheat flows through it in a golden stream until a car is full. More than a thousand bushels of wheat cam be put into a freight car, so it can be hauled a thousand miles for a cent or two a bushel. The wheat takes a journey, It may be stored again in a big city elevator, or it may be poured into the dark hold of a ship end sent across the ocean, or it may go to a mill to be ground into flour.
Flour mills are tall, too, but not so tell as elevators. A hundred years or so ago, mills were never more than two stories high. Wheat had to be carried up to the hopper for grinding, and carried to sieves many times. Boys who were learning to be millers had to have strong backs. An American miller thought it was foolish to carry grain and flour about on people's backs. His name was Oliver Evans. He tied a bag of grain to a rope and pulled it upstairs over a pulley wheel under the roof. Then he thought of tying little buckets on a belt and pulling them up just fast enough to feed the hopper. But after that the flour had to be pulled up again end again for the grindings and siftings. At last he thought that if a mill had as many floors as there were steps in milling, the grain could be lifted to the top, fall from floor to floor, and come out finished flour at the bottom.
Wasn’t that clever? Work and time and money are all saved by building mills high. You see the link-belt is used in grain elevators, too. Americans are the cleverest people in the world for making machines do their work. Wheat is moved by machinery from the seed to the loaf of bread. Milling machinery is very wonderful. The grains are crushed between steel rollers. Other machines sift out the brown skin of the wheat seeds, and take out the little germ thatwould grow into a new plant. Machines mix the starch cells in the middle of the grain with the gluten cells around them. At the very last the flour is sifted through a silk gauze called bolting cloth. At the top of a mill the dusty brown grains pour into a big hopper. At the bottom soft, velvety white flour runs into new barrels and white muslin bags. It is ready to be made into bread. Every part that has been taken out is turned into something useful to feed animals.
The bread you ate this morning was from wheat planted six months, or a year or more ago. And while you were eating it, farmers by thousands were in the fields putting in seed for next year’s bread. Look the morning paper and see how much it has to say about wheat. It will be on an inside page. There will be a lot of it in fine print. And there will be just as much tomorrow, and next year. The story of wheat is a continued story that is told over and over again, every year. But it is never quite the same story. People are always guessing how it is going to come out at the end of the year. If you ever go to Chicago you must visit the Board of Trade, where wheat and other grains are bought and sold every day by men who guess differently. The men who guess the nearest right, make money by buying and selling wheat.