Word: croppings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...result: instead of selling all their crops at harvest time, as they did for centuries (indeed, millenniums), farmers now spread sales all through the year. That forces them to face tricky questions: Will wheat or corn or soybean prices be higher next March than now, and if so will they be enough higher to justify storing 80% of the crop until then, or only 60% of it? To complicate matters further, a farmer can work out deals to sell part of his crop in October, say, but get the cash next January if that would be better for tax purposes...
...past five years Pat has been expanding, and trying to beat the wild fluctuations in crop prices, in another way: bringing to the farm lands the concept known in industry as vertical integration. Like other growers, he resented having to take his beets for milling to the nearby American Crystal Sugar Co. plant. One reason: the company's officers, then based in Denver, insisted on shutting down the mills on weekends, even during harvest time when beets must be ground up quickly before they rot. Recalls Pat: "We were at the mercy of people a thousand miles away who just...
...extended vertical integration to wheat. He was miffed because the operators of a country elevator refused to buy part of his crop when he judged the price to be right, but told him to wait several weeks while they worked out storage and transport snarls. Benedict got nine other growers together to put up $1.5 million, buy an elevator and incorporate it as Northern Grain...
...because he's shutting down and you're taking on debts to expand." But in his view expansion is the only way to make money: "Each acre produces so little profit that all you can do is go for bigger acres and make sure that each acre produces more crop." So, besides buying land, he has purchased so much machinery that it requires a football-field-sized yard just to park it. A partial inventory: four 15-ton trucks, three pickup trucks, seven tractors, three center-pivot irrigators and three wheat combines that cost $30,000 each, yet are used...
...wheat acres this year, he would have qualified to receive a Government-guaranteed "target price" of $3.40 a bushel. Benedict elected instead to plant all his acres, gambling that eventually he will get a high enough price to make a larger profit on a bigger crop. Whether he wins he will not know for many months. He has signed a contract to sell 40% of his wheat crop, for a price that he says "will cover costs and a little more," and will store the rest to release whenever he judges market conditions to be right. At current prices, about...