Golden Sky

The sky was bright over Kansas last week. At Lawrence, the University of Kansas campus glittered with students' new cars. Never before had Lawrence seen so many convertibles and custom jobs; never before had there been such traffic jams. A glimpse at license plates told Kansans where most of the shiny cars came from--the rich western wheat counties. Kenneth Richardson, a 24-year-old student, told how he got his green 1947 Buick convertible: "During the summer I hired a crew for two combines and folowed the wheat harvest from Oklahoma to Canada. We made plenty."

Almost all Kansas farmers had made plenty. Estimates of 1947's value of crops and livestock topped $1.5 billion, up $400 million from last year's record farm prosperity. That gain alone exceeded the total farm wealth produced in the state in many a thin year. Wheat was the bonanza; 1947's phenomenal crop and 1947's soaring prices added up to more than $660 million for Kansas wheat alone.

Planting Cash. For many a farmer this prosperity was a problem as well as an unaccustomed pleasure. He had dollars galore and wanted no more--for the present. More dollars would merely put him in a higher income-tax bracket. Thus, the average farmer held back from market more wheat than usual (near Larned, one farmer kept his entire crop--about $175,000 worth at last week's prices--in storage). Normally the Kansas holdback, a form of insurance against a poor yield the next year, is about 30% of crop. This year elevators and farm bins are clogged with about 150 million bushels of wheat--50% of the crop and more than one-fourth of the breadgrains the U.S. hopes it can send to Europe this winter.*

The farmer was spending his money wisely. The bright sky might be the limit for what some would pay for a tractor or slightly used auto on the black market. But most of the farmers' spending was going into better living--running water, bathrooms, electricity and appliances, kitchen labor-savers. Nothing was too good; some farmers were buying airplanes and putting landing strips in their fields. Kansans were reaching for more land, as they always had in prosperous times. But now they were paying mostly cash; Kansans remember all too well the disasters of mortgage foreclosures in the early '30s and after the duststorm years. Farm solvency was at an all-time high and the banks bulged with cash (in one Garden City bank 600 depositors had more than $700,000).

Planting Time. It had been a whopping year. But in a literal sense, the sky might turn out to be the limit of such prosperity. It was much too bright. Last week was two weeks past the time to plant winter wheat, but the soil was hard and dry; there was little of the subsoil moisture that makes for banner crops. The last good sod-soaking rain had been in September's first week. From the north Texas and Oklahoma wheat plains came disturbing news: planting was far behind schedule; some farmers were seeding dusty fields. There were no critical spots yet, but if the next week or ten days brought no rain, there might be. The rich wheat belt waited anxiously, almost as anxiously as the world's hungry people waited for U.S. grain.

* This week Kansans were asked by Governor Frank Carlson and the Kansas Council of Churches to donate grain (or dollars to buy grain) to Europe. Already on the way to hunger areas were more than 10,000 bushels of wheat, donated in similar church-sponsored campaigns in Oklahoma and Texas.

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