Flax Moves West

by ARTHUR C. DILLMAN and L. G. GOAR

BECAUSE of its restless, roving character, flax has been called one of the curiosities of agriculture. All through the nineteenth century it was a migratory crop in the United States, advancing from New York and Pennsylvania to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana as new lands were opened to settlement.

It was a crop for the pioneer farmer, always moving a step ahead of the fatal wilt disease that developed in soils frequently cropped to flax.

H. L. Bolley, at the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, found in 1900 that flax wilt was caused by a soil-borne fungus which he described and named Fusarium lini. Later, Bolley and others developed varieties that withstood the disease, and flax settled down as a permanent crop in the North Central States.

Flax was destined to make another move—the long hop from Mandan, N. Dak., to the Imperial Valley Experiment Station, near El Centro, Calif. Several stations in California had experimented with flax between 1915 and 1918, with little success. Nevertheless, we decided that flax was worth another trial out there.

Accordingly, on November 14, 1927, seed of 10 varieties were sown in single 3-row plots 50 feet long. These were harvested in April 1928. The average yield was the equivalent of 25 bushels an acre, but one variety made 31.2 bushels. It was Punjab, a kind that C. H. Clark had selected from a sample of flaxseed obtained from Punjab, India, in 1913. Clark had made several selections at Mandan in 1914 and 1915. He retained one of the taller selections, probably a natural hybrid, and grew it several years under the designation Punjab.

The first increase plot of Punjab, grown at the Imperial Valley station, produced 212 pounds. In 1931, 2 acres were harvested. The seed was distributed to a few farmers, who harvested 110 acres in 1932 and 350 acres in 1933. All the seed harvested in 1933 was used for planting 8,000 acres in the Imperial Valley. The crop, harvested in May 1934, produced nearly 242,000 bushels.

Now flax was on its way. The one ounce of flaxseed, planted in November 1927, had established a new industry that was to bring employment and a measure of wealth to thousands of people.

In the 1930's, the Imperial Valley, in common with agriculture elsewhere, suffered from low prices and a surplus of its farm products, chiefly alfalfa, barley, wheat, melons, lettuce, and other vegetable crops. Vegetables are high-cost crops, and losses are great when there is an over- supply. That was the general situation from 1930 to 1934. Then, in 1934, flax came to the rescue. It was not a speculative crop. It found a ready-cash market and it made a modest but sure return to growers. As a result, accumulated taxes were paid up; abandoned farms were bought and paid for with one or two crops of flax; and, above all, with the acreage of grain and vegetable crops adjusted to the market, agriculture in general became more profitable.

War always increases the demand for fats and oils. After Pearl Harbor, imports of vegetable oils were greatly reduced. The United States had to depend on domestic production. The response of farmers to the need was notable, indeed. The production of fats and oils increased to the point where large quantities could be exported to our allies. In 1943 and 1944, total exports were approximately 1,600,000,000 pounds annually. Of this total, exports of linseed oil amounted to 224,466,000 pounds in 1943 and 313,244,000 pounds in 1944. In terms of flaxseed, this represents a total of 28 million bushels for the 2 years.

The increase of flaxseed production in California was remarkable. To the Imperial Valley, flax was as important as corn to Iowa. Forty percent of the farm land in the valley in 1943 was put into flax. The higher production of flaxseed in California and Arizona not only supplied the needs of the Pacific coast area for linseed oil and linseed meal, but saved the overtaxed railroads from shipping flaxseed into the area, as was the practice 10 years earlier.

The acreage harvested in California in 1939-44 averaged 183,000; the production of flaxseed averaged 3,136,000 bushels a year. Arizona farmers, chiefly those in the irrigated valley of the Colorado below Yuma, planted an average of 15,000 acres each of the 6 years, and harvested an average of nearly 340,000 bushels. Allowing for seed used on farms, the total commercial crop in California and Arizona for the 6 years was approximately 20 million bushels, or 20 thousand carloads of 1,000 bushels each. For it, the farmers received more than $50,000,000.

Weeds are a serious problem. Where flax is sown in the fall, as in California and Arizona, farmers have a long period before seeding time when weeds can be destroyed by cultivation. A common practice is to irrigate the land two or three times in early fall and cultivate after each irrigation. The land should be plowed or subsoiled (chiseled), disked, and leveled (floated) before the first irrigation. When weeds appear and the surface soil becomes dry, the field should be cultivated thoroughly, but only 3 or 4 inches deep. A spring-tooth harrow is satisfactory for the purpose. A second irrigation, followed by thorough cultivation and harrowing, will generally be enough to eliminate most weeds, arid leave the soil in good condition for planting. Sometimes a third irrigation and cultivation are needed to destroy wild oats, canary grass, and other weeds that do not appear until cooler weather comes on.