Barter Deal in Billings

In these days of depressed grain prices, many American farmers consider themselves lucky if they can cover their production costs. But one eastern Montana farmer, Gene Voss, did better--if on a small scale. With his winter wheat selling for less than $2 per bu. and costing $3.50 per bu. to produce, Voss proposed a barter deal to William Roesgen, editor of the Billings Gazette. "I believe wheat should be $6 per bu.," wrote Voss. "I would gladly bring you 9 1/4 bu. for one of your subscriptions."

Since a subscription to the daily Gazette then cost $56 a year, Roesgen accepted the offer as a way of dramatizing the farmers' plight. Then, sowing the seeds of a new kind of circulation campaign, he ran a front-page headline announcing that the paper would swap print for wheat at the federal support price of $3.05 per bu. (Meanwhile, the subscription price was raised to $61--or 20 bu. of wheat.) In ten days the Gazette had exchanged 100 new subscriptions for 2,000 bu. of wheat, which it stored in a parking lot next to the newspaper building and then sold for $2.10 per bu.

The editorial point of the stunt riled Montana State University Economics Professor Maurice Taylor, who does not think farmers are in such bad shape. He sarcastically offered to trade one of his lectures for a subscription to the Gazette. The editor, perhaps proving that he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff, turned down the professor.

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