Word: bushel
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Speculators, cried President Truman angrily, were to blame for much of the increase in food costs. But it was the Government's buying-in-a-bunch rather than spreading it out that helped make speculation a sure thing. So the U.S. had its first $2.95 a bushel cash corn in its history; its first $3 cash wheat in 27 years. When the Government temporarily stepped out of the market toward year's end, with most of the grain it needed by mid-1948 already bought, the price of May wheat futures dropped...
...Peron government, which pays Argentine farmers only $1.59 to $1.83 a bushel for wheat, demands from foreign purchasers more than $5 a bushel, payable in hard-to-get U.S. credit. As for the U.S., it had saved next to nothing so far by Charles Luckman's noisy grain conservation plan. The U.S. was still feeding some 90 million tons of grain a year to livestock; a tenth of that would avert next spring's crisis...
With Britain strapped, even this temporary agreement had been hard to reach. Finally, Canada agreed to leave the wheat contract as it stood, guaranteeing Britain 160 million bushels in the current crop year at $1.55 a bushel. For the rest, Britain would take less of other foodstuffs (e.g., cheese and bacon) at higher prices, generally about 15% above 1947 figures...
...jumpiness in the nation's grain exchanges and their acute sensitivity to everything Washington did - or said. Nor was the jumping in only one direction. After Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson disclosed that Japan needed an "unexpectedly large" amount of grain, December wheat soared to $3.20¼ a bushel, the highest in 30 years. Cash oats reached their highest price ($1.37 a bushel) in the 100 years of Board of Trade history...
George A. Kublin of the Kansas City Board of Trade estimated that the carry-over on next July 1 would be only 130,000,000 bushels. (The Department of Agriculture put it at 146,000,000.) "Anything smaller than a 235,000,000-bushel carry-over," Kublin warned, "is reckless...