We have spoken of planting grain in rows and in hills in the row.  In Fig. 130 is a field with the rows planted in pairs, the members being 16 inches apart, and together occupying 30 inches.  The space between each pair is also 30 inches, making five feet in all.  This makes frequent hoeing practicable, which is begun early in the spring and is repeated after every rain.  It also makes it possible to feed the plants when they can utilize food to the best advantage and to repeat the feeding if desirable.  Besides, the ground in the wider space may be fitted, fertilized and another crop planted before the first is removed.  The hills alternate in the rows and are 24 to 26 inches from center to center.

The planting may be done by hand or with a drill such as that in Fig. 131, ingenious in the simple mechanism which permits planting in hills.  The husbandman had just returned from the field with the drill on his shoulder when we met at the door of his village home, where he explained to us the construction and operation of the drill and permitted the photograph to be taken, but turning his face aside, not wishing to represent a specific character, in the view.  In the drill there was a heavy leaden weight swinging free from a point above the space between the openings leading to the respective drill feet.  When planting, the operator rocks the drill from side to side, causing the weight to hang first over one and then over the other opening, thus securing alternation of hills in each pair of rows.

Counting the heads of wheat in the hill in a number of fields showed them ranging between 20 and 100, the distance between the rows and between the hills as stated above.  There were always a larger number of stalks per hill where the water capacity of the soil was large, where the ground water was near the surface, and where the soil was evidently of good quality.  This may have been partly the result of stooling but we have little doubt that judgment was exercised in planting, sowing less seed on the lighter soils where less moisture was available.  In the piece just referred to, in the illustration, an average hill contained 46 stalks and the number of kernels in a head varied between 20 and 30.  Taking Richardson’s estimate of 12,000 kernels of wheat to the pound, this field would yield about twelve bushels of wheat per acre this unusually dry season.  Our interpreter, whose parents lived near Kaomi, four stations further west, stated that in 1901, one of their best seasons, farmers there secured yields as high as 875 catty per legal mow, which is at the rate of 116 bushels per acre.  Such a yield on small areas highly fertilized and carefully tilled, when the rainfall is ample or where irrigation is practiced, is quite possible and in the Kiangsu province we observed individual small fields which would certainly approach close to this figure.