HUSBANDRY: Crops This Month

Each month during the growing season the Secretary of Agriculture receives in specially marked and colored envelopes figures on crop conditions and prospects from 120,000 crop reporters throughout the land. This great bundle of reports, from which official U. S. crop estimates will later be distilled, the Secretary stows away in a great safe. No government documents are accorded greater secrecy; a “leak” might enable grain and cotton speculators to make large and illegitimate profits. On estimate day (generally the tenth of the month) the Crop Board under William Forrest Callander marches into a large top-floor room in the Department of Agriculture building, seats itself around tables on which stand computing machines. Under police guard the crop reports are ceremoniously delivered to the Board. Frosted glass has been fitted into the windows to bar outside signaling. All telephones are disconnected. Doors are bolted and locked. The police guard stands at attention.

Rapidly the field reports are cast up and averaged by States. Each Board member is given an identical table of State crop estimates and asked to fill in the national total according to his best judgment. These individual totals are then averaged and the result becomes the mystically potent U. S. Crop Forecast. The final estimate is mimeographed, carried under guard to another room where telephones at tables line the wall. Six or eight eager newshawks stand inside a chalked square in the centre of the room. One copy of the estimate is laid face down on each table. The Secretary of Agriculture enters. At 4 p.m. he says “Get ready—go!” Each newsman leaps the four or five feet to his table, babbles his copy of the Crop Forecast into the telephone.

Last week’s babblings:

The Corn Crop, estimated at 2,800,000,000 bu. on July 1, 2,120,000,000 bu. Aug. 1, had declined to 1,983,000,000 bu. on Sept. 1 as a result of the Drought. This harvest would be the smallest in 29 years. Two months of rainlessness had withered 29% or 817,000,000 bu. of the corn crop, a cash loss of about $775,000,000. The 1930 crop appeared to be 24% less than that of 1929.

The Wheat Crop estimate rose from 821,000,000 bu. on Aug. 1 to 838,000,000 bu. on Sept. 1. Last year’s harvest of 806,000,000 bu. was productive of this year’s price depressing surplus.

“Damned Rubes.” Last week Chairman Alexander Legge of the Federal Farm Board grew explosively irate because husbandmen were slow to substitute wheat for corn feed. Declared he:

“We’d be on a domestic consumption basis in grain if stock feeders would use wheat. . . . There isn’t a bushel of grain too much in this country now. But a lot of damned rubes are doing what their grandfathers did, selling wheat at 70¢ a bushel and buying corn at $1 for feed.”