Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and JapanKing, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Science
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Agriculture -- China; Agriculture -- Japan; Agriculture -- Korea
Counting the heads of wheat in the hill in a number of fields showed
them ranging between 20 and 100, the distance between the rows and
between the hills as stated above. There were always a larger number
of stalks per hill where the water capacity of the soil was large,
where the ground water was near the surface, and where the soil was
evidently of good quality. This may have been partly the result of
stooling but we have little doubt that judgment was exercised in
planting, sowing less seed on the lighter soils where less moisture
was available. In the piece just referred to, in the illustration,
an average hill contained 46 stalks and the number of kernels in a
head varied between 20 and 30. Taking Richardson's estimate of
12,000 kernels of wheat to the pound, this field would yield about
twelve bushels of wheat per acre this unusually dry season. Our
interpreter, whose parents lived near Kaomi, four stations further
west, stated that in 1901, one of their best seasons, farmers there
secured yields as high as 875 catty per legal mow, which is at the
rate of 116 bushels per acre. Such a yield on small areas highly
fertilized and carefully tilled, when the rainfall is ample or where
irrigation is practiced, is quite possible and in the Kiangsu
province we observed individual small fields which would certainly
approach close to this figure.
Further along in our journey of the day we came upon a field where
three, one of them a boy of fourteen years, were hoeing and thinning
millet and maize. In China, during the hot weather, the only garment
worn by the men in the field, was their trousers, and the boy had
found these unnecessary, although he slipped into them while we were
talking with his father. The usual yield of maize was set at 420 to
480 catty per mow, and that of millet at 600 catty, or 60 to 68.5
bushels of maize and 96 bushels of millet, of fifty pounds, per
acre, and the usual price would make the gross earnings $23.48 to
$26.83 per acre for the maize, and $30.96, gold, for the millet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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