The Blue-Flowered Bonanza: How Whatcom County Found Flax

Experiment has demonstrated beyond a possibility of doubt that the soil and the climate of Puget Sound, and Washington generally, are adapted to the culture of flax, and it is believed that in a very few years this department of agriculture will rank as one of the greatest of our industries. To Dr. A. W. Thornton, of Ferndale, is due the important discovery, and through his agency the United States agricultural department has become interested in the experiments made last season. An appropriation has been made to aid in the furtherance of the culture. This amount, $800, will be used the coming spring in experimenting on a large scale and for the purpose of obtaining the best possible results. Whatcom county can lay claim to having raised the first flax crop in the state of Washington.

The investigations were carried on with thick seeding for the sake of securing a fine quality of fiber, regardless of the yield of seed. In the great flax district around Belfast the yield of seed amounts to so little that it is entirely ignored, and in many cases no attempt is made to save it. Yet even under thick seeding the Puget Sound grown seed surpasses that grown in any other part of the world, both in yield and quality. In Europe, with the same heavy seeding of one and a half to two bushels per acre, the yield of seed averaged from two to five bushels per acre, while in Dr. Thornton's experience here it ran from nine to seventeen bushels per acre. Had his seeding been with a view to the growth of as large a crop of seed as possible, it is believed over twenty bushels of seed per acre could have been obtained, where eleven to fourteen bushels only is an average good crop in Dakota, Minnesota and Illinois.

It is not, however, to the seed yield that the Puget Sound grower needs to confine his efforts; the value of the fiber so far overshadows it that it need only be considered a side issue, though of great value in itself. The straw here runs two and three-fourths to four tons per acre, yielding 1,375 to 2,000 pounds of clean fiber, worth seventeen cents per pound, and nine to seventeen bushels of seed. On the most conservative European estimates, at the higher percentage our superior straw and greater length of fiber may fairly command, the returns run to over $200 an acre.

It is understood that farmers in the Big Bend and Yakima districts, in addition to several in Whatcom county, will in the year 1895 plant many hundred acres in flax. It is asserted upon good authority that a number of New York capitalists will soon organize a company in the state for the purpose of enlarging and pushing this important industry.