Word: bushelful
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High price supports in recent years led to bumper crops and, eventually, an enormous surplus: 1 billion bushels of wheat, a whole year's supply (which cost the Government $2.5 billion, plus $150 million a year for storage fees). Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson cut the planted wheat acreage from 79 to 55 million, while the support price dropped from $2.24 a bushel to $2.06. To qualify for support payments, farmers had to accept quotas and acreage restrictions. They complained but complied. Result: the harvest fell from 1,300 million bushels in 1952 to 839 million this year...
...crop, Secretary Benson cut the proposed support price again, to reduce production further. In last week's election, farmers were faced with a hard choice: to accept the quota restrictions and a support price of $1.81 a bushel for their wheat (76% of parity), or to reject the quotas and sell all they can at whatever price the market would bring. Without quotas, the supported price would be only $1.19 a bushel and to get that, farmers still would have to accept acreage restrictions. "It's not too good a choice," said South Dakota's Senator Francis...
...biggest single consumer of water is irrigation, which has spread from a few thousand western acres in 1850 to some 30 million acres, sprawled over such eastern and southern states as Delaware, Rhode Island, Mississippi. To grow a bushel of corn by irrigation requires about 10,000 gallons of water; to grow a ton of alfalfa hay, about 200,000 gallons. At present irrigation soaks up about 100 billion gallons of water daily, almost half the water withdrawn by the entire nation...
...harvesting of the new winter wheat crop got under way in the Southwestern states, it looked as if the U.S. would face a wheat shortage of a kind; it might not have all the high-quality wheat that U.S. bakers need. Of the U.S.'s billion-bushel stockpile of wheat, farmers and bakers estimate that only 10% to 25% is usable in its present form by the breadmaking industry-the single biggest wheat user. The rest would have to be upgraded by blending it with strong-gluten wheat.* But there is comparatively little strong-gluten wheat available with which...
Commercial millers are willing to pay a premium of 25? a bushel for strong-gluten wheat. In a free market, this premium would encourage farmers to produce the high-quality grain. But it has not worked that way under the support program. While drought and a siege of rust have cut down on the output of strong-gluten grain, the price-support program has encouraged wheat farmers to sacrifice quality for quantity...