Rain at Ulysses

Rain fell one day last month in a little Kansas town called Ulysses, in Grant County. A local correspondent for a grain elevator house flashed the word to his Kansas City office. Direct wires carried the news to Chicago and Manhattan, where cables whipped it on to Liverpool and Buenos Aires. It was only a matter of minutes before all the world's wheat speculators knew that at last rain had moistened the dry wheat fields of the U. S. "dust bowl."

Within a few days the shrewd crop estimators in the big Chicago grain firms announced forecasts averaging 537,000,000 bu. for the 1936 U. S. winter wheat harvest. Together with a spring wheat crop of perhaps 200,000,000 bu., that would put the U. S. on an export basis once again, since domestic needs run around 630,000,000 bu. annually. And steady selling drove down the price of wheat on the Chicago Board of Trade from $1 per bu. early last month to a low of 93 1/4-c- last week.

Then the U. S. Crop Reporting Board dampened all this market bearishness more effectively than rain had dampened Kansas. Predicting that 21% of all acreage sown last autumn would be abandoned, it forecast a winter wheat crop of only 493,000,000 bu. for 1936,60,000,000 bu. more than was harvested in lean 1935 but far below the 618.000,000 bu. average for the five preceding years.

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