CROPS OF THE FIELD

Cereal Grains as Food and Feed

Kenneth R. Majors.

Most of the world's population depends directly on the annual harvest of cereal grains for its basic food staples. The needs of the great numbers of domestic livestock and poultry add a secondary value to the cereals as a source of feed. The vast acreage planted to cereal grains in relation to that of other crops reflects their essentiality as food and feed.

The cereal grains, all members of the grass family, are grown for their edible starchy seeds. Most prominent members of the group are corn, rice, wheat, barley, oats, rye, grain sorghums, and millet. Among them are several of' the world's leading crops. Buckwheat is not a true member of the grass family, but it is often classed with cereal grains because of its similarity in chemical composition and use.

The origins of some of the more important cereal grains are obscure. More than one had its cultural beginning before recorded history. The development of cereal grains, probably more than any other factor, permitted the earliest tribes to change from nomadic life to more settled existence. They learned that cultivation of cereal grains provided more food with less effort than did any other crop. No other offered such security of subsistence. In addition, grain could be easily stored to provide food between harvests. Certain it is that the saving in time needed to provide their food essentials left them with more leisure to learn new arts and crafts.

Major parts of the world's population subsist mainly on wheat and rice. The importance of wheat in the basic food economy of the United States and the other advanced countries is well known. As a country develops from a totally agrarian mode of life to a diversified existence, consumption of wheat as food increases accordingly. The use of wheat as a feed grain varies from year to year, depending on supply and market prices.

In other parts of the globe, rice is equally essential to the fundamental food habits of another large segment of the world's population. Those who depend almost entirely on rice for their subsistence live in the poorer and more thickly populated areas of the rice-growing regions.

Inhabitants of many countries, because of climate or other factors, must depend mainly on corn, rye, barley, or one of the lesser grains for their main food staple. That is especially true of the underprivileged classes of such countries.

Corn, sometimes termed the backbone of American agriculture, owes its importance to its principal use as feed. It provides livestock and poultry feeders in the United States with well over half of all their feed grain. Some 85 to 90 percent of the crop is used in that way. Consequently about 75 percent of the corn crop never leaves the farm on which it is produced. Since the Second World War, corn utilized in industrial processes accounts for about one-third of that grain sold off the farm. Most of the rest goes to feeders and to the mixed-feeds industry. Thus, an important cereal grain, while not being consumed directly as human food, is converted on a big scale to other forms of food for humans.

Also used as feed grains are oats, barley, grain sorghums, wheat, rye, millet, and buckwheat. In localities where corn is not grown, we find one or more of them in a leading role as a feed grain, depending on which is suited to the climate and economics of the region.

Most of the cereal grains, except rice, which enter the world commerce grow on the prairies and plains of the United States and Canada, on the pampas of Argentina, in the Russian Ukraine and nearby countries, and in the grain belt of Australia.

WHEAT, grown on more of the world's acreage than any other crop, is adaptable to a wide range of soils and climate and can be grown extensively throughout the world, except in the Tropics. Barley perhaps is the only other grain with the same degree of climatic adaptability. In general, the main wheat belt lies between latitudes of 30 to 55 in the North Temperate Zone and 25 to 40 in the South Temperate Zone, where the annual rainfall averages between 12 and 45 inches.

In the United States, five classes of wheat are commonly grown hard red spring, soft red winter, hard red winter, durum, and white.

Winter wheats are sown in the fall for harvesting the following summer. They have an earlier start over wheats planted in the spring, and can be harvested earlier. They yield more than spring wheats wherever they can survive the winter.

North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana, which supply most of our hard red spring wheats, are so far north that winters are too rigorous for winter wheats, except in limited areas.

Hard red winter wheats are grown on more acres than are any of the other classes. These wheats are produced in about two-thirds of the Great Plains States and in parts of Idaho, Washing. ton, and Oregon. Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas lead.

Durum wheats can be grown in much the same areas of the United States as the hard red spring wheats, but most of the production is in North Dakota.

A humid climate is favorable for the soft red winter wheats, which are grown more in the eastern part of the United States, from the east coast west to the hard red winter wheat belt. Ohio is one of the leading producers. Some is also grown in the Pacific Northwest.

White wheats are produced in some parts of New York, Michigan, and Ontario, and to a greater extent in the Pacific Northwest and California.

Rice, on a world basis, follows wheat and corn in acreage. Only potatoes and wheat exceed rice in quantities produced, and wheat has but a very narrow margin of advantage.

Rice is produced in warm, humid regions in tropical or semitropical climates, and where fresh water is available or where topography and soil types are suitable for irrigation. An abundance of water is required at certain seasons, because rice plants must be submerged in 4 to 6 inches of water during most of the growing period. One type, upland rice, is grown like the other cereal grains without a flooding period. Because rice produces high acre yields, it is grown as the principal food in the densely populated areas of the Orient. About 95 percent of the rice is produced in Asia and nearby islands.

Before the Second World War, most of the rice entering world trade was grown in Burma, Siam, and French Indochina. The surplus exported from that area in 1947 was only one-fourth the prewar volume. Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and California are the rice-growing areas of the United States.