Too Much Wheat

The land was good, the planning bad, the result fantastic. The harvest season found the U.S. with too much wheat, millions on millions of bushels too much--so much that the Midwest had to store it in boarded-up schoolhouses, hotels, garages.

Last week the amazingly efficient harvester-thresher machines were moving north, from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, adding more grain to the glut. The year's crop was expected to hit 900,000,000 bushels. Grain men figured that this, plus the 630,000,000 bushels carried over from last year, would be enough to supply the whole U.S. for two years, without putting another seed in the ground.

As far back as last October the Department of Agriculture had warned of the present storage shortage; few heeded until Pearl Harbor made sober farmers realize that foreign markets were gone. Then it was too late for many to get nails, tin and lumber for sheds. Commodity Credit Corp., with WPB priorities, let contracts for 60,000 prefabricated wood and metal bins to be sold to farmers, enough to hold 110,000,000 bushels of wheat. But the contractors fell behind schedule.

Next year U.S. farmers--barring a bad crop--will face the same problem of overabundance, for the wheat, acreage will be the same. Now was a good time for them to ponder advice given since Farmer George Washington's time: get away from the one-crop system.

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