Output Of Grain Research Articles

Correctly Handle the Relations Between Grain and Cotton and West High Yields in Both Grain And Cotton

Huang-lu Commune, Ch'ao hsien, Anhwei Province, situated at the north shore Ch'ao Lake, seriously implemented the policy of "taking grain as the key link to achieve all-round development." The output of grain and cotton increased year after year. Compared with 1971, the average yield per mou of the 7,818 mou of food crops increased by 5.3 percent, reaching 1,153 catties. The average yield per mou of ginned cotton in the 4,050 mou of cotton increased by 33.3 percent, reaching 120 catties. There was substantial development in forestry, animal husbandry, sideline production, and fisheries. In 1973 the commune sold to the state 480,000 catties of grains, over 461,000 catties of cotton, and 2,300 fat pigs as its contribution in support of socialist revolution and construction.

Investigations on yield in the cereals. I

Itis unlikely that as a formulated problem any consideration of settled crop-husbandry is of greater antiquity than the cereal yield problem. In its broad form it embraces all the possible means of increasing the output of grain per unit area. The earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt must have been compelled to explore these means as soon as they began to encounter the limitations to cultivable area which dwelling in fixed communities imposed. Wheat and barley were their principal food stuffs so that the cereal yield problem, the most comprehensive concern of present-day agriculture, goes back to the remotest antiquity. It must have evoked incessant effort along divers lines and the cumulative result is appreciable from a comparison of the best cereal races of to-day and the forms which likeHordeum spontaneumandTriticum dicoccum dicoccoideshave been regarded as the progenitor types. Unfortunately it is not possible to trace back very far the sequence of the solution of the problem as constituted by improvements in husbandry and the utilization of better cereal forms. Fragments of information may be culled from the writings of various periods but they are of doubtful value. The author's reliability is often in question, the unit of measure uncertain, and even the identity of the crop a matter of doubt. Herodotus' well-known story, passed on from another, of increases of 200 and even 300 fold yielded by barley in Mesopotamia in 500B.c.is possibly the oldest fragment. It is difficult to interpret but it gains colour from the further statement that the leaves of the plant were of the width of four fingers. Concerning progress in England, while reasonably precise information goes back no further than forty years, there are widely separated records of sufficient worth to indicate the historical trend. It has been deduced from the Manorial Records that at the time when that system had become established there was a flat rate of about ten bushels per acre for wheat. Much later, when Sir Charles Davenant compiledAn Essay upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade(published 1699), he computed the “neat produce” of eight million acres of arable land to be 79 million bushels of grain.