RYE Because it grows on soil too poor and arid for other grains, rye is called "the grain of poverty." Rye meal makes the bread of peasants in European countries, over a vast area of the poorest, and so the cheapest, land. The extremes of heat and cold are suffered by these people, whose agriculture is of a hopelessly primitive sort. They scratch in the grain, drag or harrow it, and gather the harvest with hand sickles, as their parents have done for generations without number.
In Russia more rye is grown than in any other country. It is a great crop in Scandinavia and northern Germany, where everybody eats rye bread and likes it. The German "pumpernickel" is a bread that many Americans like. Not all of them know that they are eating the rye loaf, the "black bread," of Europe. The liking for this loaf may be hereditary in those of us who come of New England ancestry, for the brown bread that accompanied the baked beans was "half rye and half Indian meal." That loaf was and is deserv edly popular.
Rye is a grain used extensively in the making of whiskey. It is more for this purpose than for any other the crop is raised in the United States. Poor land is often sowed to rye for its improvement; the green crop is turned under or pastured, the roots left to form humus.
Rye straw is wiry and long, on good land, and though too fibrous to make good forage for cattle when ripe it is the best for making paper and paste board, for straw hats, and bedding stables for horses. The longest straw is used by gardeners to wrap tender, trees and shrubs that must stay outdoors all winter. It is used as packing ma
terial by manufacturers of all kinds of fragile wares. The straw often pays better than the grain.
Rye is known in very few varieties, and is probably not one of the oldest cultivated grains. Its parent form, botanists say, grew on the moun tainous, dry regions from southern Europe east ward to Central Asia.
The "head" of a stalk of rye is like that of bearded wheat; the prickly, needle-like beard makes the handling of the grain at harvest time very hard on the hands of those who bind and stack the grain. The flower of rye is similar to to the flower of wheat.
The grain contains more bran than wheat, and less starch, but more sugar. Rye bread is dark in color and sweet, with a is pleasantly aromatic and slightly sour. It spoils the flour to grind rye fine and discard its bran, for therein the characteristic taste is found.
Rye is particularly susceptible to attack by a fungus called ergot, whose black or purplish body develops at the expense of the kernel. The destruction of a part of the grain crop is not all the harm this disease does to the farmer. Cattle fed on hay and grain infected with the fungus are gradually poisoned; they develop loathsome sores, and may lose hoofs, ail, ears, and horns as the disease progresses.
To prevent the spread of ergot in grain fields and pastures, infected plants must be cut and destroyed. Farmers who understand that the spores are carried by wind to fields in bloom are careful to have roadside grasses cut. They also dip their seed grain in a fungicide, like diluted formalin.