Miracle Crop

On Oklahoma's rolling wheatlands this spring, all signs pointed to a lean year. Stalks that normally would have been thigh-high were hardly more than stubble; some fields were so thin that farmers plowed them under. Experts forecast that Oklahoma, which harvested an elevator-busting 104 million bushels in 1947, would bring home this year only 74 million bushels.

Last week, as the combines clanked northward, farmers from the Red River to beyond the Cimarron reported a miracle. Instead of the forecast five or six bushels an acre, the marginal fields were yielding 16 and up. In the good fields, one farm produced 52 bushels an acre, another 75. Fearing that no one would believe him, Harry Corbet of Alfalfa County got the State Board of Agriculture to certify that his four acres of bottom land had yielded a whopping 83 bushels an acre. With 80% of the crop cut, Oklahomans joyfully boosted their estimates to 88 million bushels, hoped to do even better.

The odd thing about the fine crop was that the stalks were stunted; no man could stand waist-deep in most Oklahoma wheatfields. But the heads of the wheat were astonishingly fat. Many had what appeared to be double heads. When he first picked some samples, the Oklahoma Experiment Station's Dr. A. M. Schlehuber, who has done wheat research for 17 years, thought that he had found a new variety. But as the telescope-like heads turned up on one variety after another, he discarded his theory, confessed: "I don't know."

For the moment, farmers were too happy to care about a scientific explanation. As the miracle appeared in Kansas this week, many a farmer became convinced that the Department of Agriculture's recent forecast of 1,192,425,000 bushels (TIME, June 21), second only to last year's record 1,364,919,000 bushels, was sure to prove too low.

California citrus growers were plagued by an opposite turn of nature. The Wall Street Journal reported that for the fourth successive year, Valencia oranges had mysteriously grown smaller. It took an average of 277 of them to fill a crate this year, as compared with 276 in 1947, 264 in 1946, 254 in 1945, 220 before that. The University of California's citrus experiment station admitted that it had no clues. One desperate expert talked darkly of "the effects of sunspots."

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