BARLEY. Hordeum satirum, Jessen. Gramines.
An annual cereal grain, supposed to be native of western Asia, and cultivated from the earliest times. It is grown for the grain and herbage, the grain being used as food for live-stock, but chiefly in the making of malt for beer. Flowers perfect, the stamens 3, styles 2, arranged in spikelets that are borne 2 to 6 on notches or nodes of the rachis and form ing a long head or spike; flowering glumes 5-nerved, one of them usually long-awned, usually persisting about the grain as a hull; empty glumes very narrow and surrounding the spikelet.
Barley was very widely grown before the Christian era and was used largely as food for human consumption. Its use as a bread plant was universal throughout the civilized countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, down to the close of the fifteenth century. It gradually gave way to the bet ter grains for bread-making, and is now, and will henceforth probably be used mostly as an animal food and for brewing purposes. The inhabitants of the European and Asiatic countries used barley rather generally as a food for horses, and the practice is common at present in several of those regions.
According to the Twelfth Cen sus there were in the United States 272,913 farms reported as pro ducing barley in 1899. They de voted to the crop 4,470,196 acres, and secured a production of 119, bushels, valued at $41,631,762. The four states giving the highest production are, in order, California, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wiscon sin. According to the Fourth Census of Canada (1901), there were in the Dominion, 871,800 acres in barley, which produced 22,224,366 bushels.
Varieties.
For all practical purposes, barley may be classi fied as six-rowed, four-rowed, and two-rowed. There are also beardless, bearded and hulless varie ties of the above groups. The four-rowed barley does not seem to be a distinct variety, but a vari ation of the six-rowed, as often the six-rowed bar ley drops two rows midway up the spike, the upper part being nearly four-rowed.
Linnaeus and the earlier botanists recognized six species : Six-rowed barleys . a.
I 1. Hordeum icbum Two-rowed barleys . c. Naked barleys . .
I f. j Botanists now generally group all these as sub types under the botanical name of Hordeum sati rum, which is taken in the sense of a group-species. All the cultivated barleys are supposed to be de rived from the wild West Asian Hordeum spon taneum, C. Koch.
The term "variety" is used by seedsmen, plant breeders and farmers in a wider and not so rigid sense as that applied by the botanist. Races of barley, the type of which has been materially changed by careful selection or cross-breeding for a period of years, are in common practice desig nated as " varieties." The Manshury or Manchuria, Oderbrucker, Golden Queen, Hanna, Silver King, and the like, are terms that have been given to various strains of barley, and each is often used as applying to a distinct variety. In common practice the name of the country from which a grain is received is often applied to the variety and may become known over a great extent of territory. The Manshury barley is known throughout the United States and Canada, and is more generally grown in parts of the middle West than any other type.
Culture.
Adaptability.—Barley is grown under a wider range of soil and climatic conditions than any other cereal, and readily adjusts itself to the natural environments under which it is placed. In Europe, barley is grown from the Mediterra nean sea to Lapland, 70° north latitude, and in America from southern California and eastward to the Copper River Experiment Station farm in Alaska. While barley can be raised on a wide range of soils, it grows best and yields the most marketable grain when grown on old, well-subdued lands, where the plant-food is readily obtain able. Barley is an early-maturing cereal, and the root growth is shorter and less abundant than that of oats or wheat; consequently, it is necessary to sow it on land that is in a high state of fertility and cultivation. A rich clay loam seems to be preferable. It is easily injured while the plants are young by an overabundance of moisture, and, therefore, should not be sown on land that is soggy, or where the water-line is too near the surface.