WHEAT GROWING IN AMERICA.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1489, 16 March 1885, Page 2

WHEAT GROWING IN AMERICA.

Mr H. G. Platt, writing to Bradstreet's on “Wheat Growing in Dakota,” says that the actual cost of wheat to him was 56 cents a bushel, but ha admits that interest and wear and tear on machinery, and interest on the cost of the land should be charged, and these items are cot included. Wheat, when he wrote was selling at 45 cents per bushel in Dakota. Partly owing to the credit system, he says, many farmers have had to sell out and leave their farms, to get away from “ the mouuta'n of interest towering up before them,”and “old wheat fields are going to have a rest.” Another correspondent of the journal just named, writing from Winnipeg, says that wheat costs not has than 50 cents a bushel to raise in Manitoba, while it has been selling {at 46 cents. He believes wheat growing will not pay in the Canadian North-West. “ The seasons," he adds, “ are apparently too short for grain growing. The wheat crops must always bf a painfully uncertain ong, even when it is not a failure. Drought and cold continually threaten its earlier stages; frost menaces it in its latter. The mercury has a most alarming habit of hanging around the ‘ thirties ’ in the latter part of summer.” This year the crop has been not only a failure, but a disaster. The writer desqribes the harvest as having been a very wet one, spoiling a great deal of the wheat, which has yielded not more than 12 to 15 bushels per acre, he thinks. The Department of Agriculture estimated that there would be at least 6,000,Q0Q bushels for export, but up to November 17th only about 500 000 bushels had been shipped — Bell's Weekly Messenger