Word: harvesters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, it looked as if Bill Richards, now 41, had stumbled into a gold mine. On Cape Cod, where he farms 300 once-scrubby, sand-swept acres by intensive irrigation, neighbors call him "the broccoli king." This summer, barring a hurricane, he will harvest close to $200,000 worth of broccoli and lettuce from a farm which, by Texas standards, is hardly more than a pea patch. He will probably gross as much again from the sale of irrigation pipes and pumps to farmers who want to adopt his system...
...months the Department of Agriculture had sent up a dire warning: this summer the U.S. would harvest the second biggest wheat crop in history but would have no place to store it. Taking its own warning to heart, the Government last week began floating twelve Liberty ships out of the Hudson River "mothball fleet" to provide "emergency" storage...
...emergency had been adjusted elsewhere. As farmers out in the wheat belt already knew, the long-heralded "glut" of wheat simply had not materialized. The harvest was all but over in Texas, Oklahoma and the big Kansas "breadbasket," and it had turned out from 20% to 40% smaller than the Government's June estimates. Said one surprised Kansas farmer: "I've got the finest 40-bushel straw and the poorest 10-bushel wheat you ever saw." Reasons for the dwindling crop: long, unseasonal rains, in some cases hail, and plant diseases like stem rust and glume blotch...
...good. Yield ran from as low as 2 bushels an acre up to 40. The Kansas crop was almost a complete reversal of last year's "miracle wheat," where stunted, scraggly stems had borne unexpectedly huge heads, and the state's estimated 160-million-bushel harvest had turned into 231 million bushels. This year's 251-million-bushel estimate may turn out to be as much as 75 million bushels too high...
Caught Short. The poor harvest carried a few windfalls of good fortune. Last week, as feckless "shorts" ran to cover their bets in the grain markets, the price of wheat futures rose to the highest they had been in five months. At their peak of $2.06, December futures were 10? a bushel higher than a month ago. Millers and bakers, who had been taking their own good time about buying supplies, expecting to get bargain prices, decided to do their buying now-before prices got any higher...