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
In the Shantung province the large millet, sorghum or kaoliang,
yields as high as 2000 to 3000 pounds of seed per acre, and 5600 to
6000 pounds of air-dry stems, equal in weight to 1.6 to 1.7 cords of
dry oak wood. In the region of Mukden, Manchuria, its average yield
of seed is placed at thirty-five bushels of sixty pounds weight per
acre, and with this comes one and a half tons of fuel or of building
material. Hosie states that, the kaoliang is the staple food of the
population of Manchuria and the principal grain food of the work
animals. The grain is first washed in cold water and then poured
into a kettle with four times its volume of boiling water and cooked
for an hour, without salt, as with rice. It is eaten with chopsticks
with boiled or salted vegetables. He states that an ordinary servant
requires about two pounds of this grain per day, and that a workman
at heavy labor will take double the amount. A Chinese friend of his,
keeping five servants, supplied them with 240 pounds of millet per
month, together with 16 pounds of native flour, regarded as
sufficient for two days, and meat for two days, the amount not being
stated. Two of the small millets (Setaria italica, and Panicum
milliaceum), wheat, maize and buckwheat are other grains which are
used as food but chiefly to give variety and change of diet.
Very large quantities of matting and wrappings are also made from
the leaves of the large millet, which serve many purposes
corresponding with the rice mattings and bags of Japan and southern
China.
The small millets, in Shantung, yield as high as 2700 pounds of seed
and 4800 pounds of straw per acre. In Japan, in the year 1906, there
were grown 737,719 acres of foxtail, barnyard and proso millet,
yielding 17,084,000 bushels of seed or an average of twenty-three
bushels per acre. In addition to the millets, Japan grew, the same
year, 5,964,300 bushels of buckwheat on 394,523 acres, or an average
of fifteen bushels per acre. The next engraving, Fig. 205, shows a
crop of millet already six inches high planted between rows of
windsor beans which had matured about the middle of June. The leaves
had dropped, the beans had been picked from the stems, and a little
later, when the roots had had time to decay the bean stems would be
pulled and tied in bundles for use as fuel or for fertilizer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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