Trigo castellano — wheat in sixteenth-century New Spain
The Old World grain that went the other way across the Columbian exchange, and what happened to it when it did: hundredfold yields on the plain of Puebla, unmanured land sown every year, wheat planted by hand in ridges two or three grains to the hole in the manner of maize, and a valley at Atlixco where one field was being sown while another was ready to cut. Read in the eyewitness of a Franciscan writing in 1541 — who also records who was working the first wheat fields, and for whom.
Why this wins its question: The Columbian exchange is normally told westward — maize, potato, tomato, cacao — and the eastbound cereal gets one line about Spaniards bringing wheat. This object gives the arrival its measurements from the pages of a friar who was standing there in 1541: one fanega to a hundred at the founding of Puebla, more than a hundred and fifty elsewhere, fifteen years of prior cropping that rule out virgin-soil luck, land sown every year without manure, the hand-planting in ridges two or three grains to the hole that is a maize technique carrying a European grain, ox teams and carts, and a valley at Atlixco with five stages of wheat standing at once — and then, from the same page as the best number, the encomienda of Cholula that the first field was sown for.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Motolinía sets the grain inside a two-way ledger rather than a one-way gift. Writing by 1541 he lists what the Spaniards brought after them — horses, cows, livestock, clothing, dress, fowl, wheat, plants "y muchos géneros de semillas, así de flores como de hortalizas" — and in the same sentence says that the Mexica in their turn brought many things that had not been there before and enriched the land with their industry and diligence, naming maize, dress and building in adobe and stone, and adding that almost all the masons of the country are from Tenochtitlan or Texcoco. The framing is his; so is the contempt in the clause that those who lived there before lived "como salvajes", and the reader should carry both.
The yields he reports for wheat are extraordinary and he knows it. At the founding of Puebla — San Francisco de los Ángeles — a settler had sown the land marked out for the monastery with wheat; asked how much he had sown and reaped, he answered that he had sown one fanega and harvested a hundred. Motolinía compares the ground to the land Isaac sowed in Palestine, of which Genesis says he reaped a hundredfold, and adds that elsewhere in New Spain he has been assured that one fanega gave more than a hundred and fifty fanegas of trigo castellano.
He also stops the obvious objection himself: this was not the freak first crop of virgin soil. The bank of that stream had been sown for more than fifteen years before the city was built there — sown, he says, for the Spaniard who held the town of Cholula in encomienda — and the custom of New Spain is that the land is sown every year and yields well without being manured. The finest wheat statistic in the book arrives attached to the labour arrangement that produced it.
The technique that got those returns was not Castilian. The high yields, Motolinía says, come from wheat sown by hand as maize is — the ground worked into camellones, ridges, the sower scratching with his hand and dropping two or three grains, doing the same a span further on, "y despues sale una mata llena de cañas y espigas". Broadcast sowing is what a Spanish farmer would have done; this is an American planting method applied to a European grain, and it is what the hundredfold figure describes.
Around the harvest the rest of the Old World farming kit arrives together. The land is worked with ox teams "al modo de España", and carts of the Spanish type are so common at Puebla that it is a sight to see them coming in loaded each day — some with wheat, others with maize, others with firewood for burning lime, others with beams and timber — while those returning to the port carry provisions for the ships. Maize is in the same carts, and Motolinía records that land near the city has given three hundred fanegas of maize for one.
In the warm irrigated valley of Atlixco the crop broke out of the European calendar altogether. Because the land is hot, frost does not hurt it and there is abundant running water, they "siembran y cogen cuando quieren", and it often happens that one wheat field has just been sown, another is sprouting, another in the blade, another in ear and another ready to cut, all at once — whereas in cold country, he notes, wheat gives only once a year as in Spain. Men who knew land told him the vega was better than the vega of Granada or that of Orihuela.
By the end of the seventeenth century the single introduced grain had become a set of named varieties suited to different ground. The Franciscan chronicler Agustín de Vetancurt, listing at Mexico in 1698 the seeds the land owes to Spain — wheat, barley, aniseed, coriander, cumin, chickpeas, vetch, broad beans and lentils — records that of wheat there is grown in abundance "Trigo Candial, y Pelon, de Riego, y Temporal, el Blanquillo, y Tremesino que se da en menos tiempo, y acude mas": bread wheat and a bare-eared kind, irrigated and rain-fed, and a three-month wheat that ripens fastest and yields most. The same page carries the 1678 scare in which the blanquillo was denounced as a cause of grave illness and ordered fed to animals, an episode this corpus treats in the object on Vetancurt's chronicle.
Both witnesses are friars of the same order writing inside the colonial order they describe, and neither is disinterested about what wheat meant. Motolinía is measuring the prosperity of a Spanish city founded in his own lifetime and his figures are what a settler told him; Vetancurt is compiling a ledger of what the land "owes to Spain". Nothing in either source counts what the wheat displaced — the maize land converted, the tribute in labour that ploughed it, or the effect on the towns whose people worked the encomendero's field by the stream at Cholula.