Word: hundredweights
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Last week's full moon was the harvest moon, round and rich as the nation's produce has been this year. Across the plains, wheat farmers threshed bumper crops. Potato growers from Maine to Idaho were unearthing what should be a record yield-about 314 million hundredweight for the year. The hops of Oregon's Willamette Valley are in the sacks. The agribusiness entrepreneurs of California's San Joaquin Valley have had another good year in cotton. The peaches of Comus, Md., have rarely been juicier. Helminthosporium maydis-the wind-borne spore of Southern corn blight...
...agriculture is still one of the world's wonders-and its economics is still a mess. Amid spectacular farm production and surpluses, some 15 million Americans go underfed. Last week, in an attempt to drive the price of prize Idaho potatoes up from about $2.50 a hundredweight to $3.50, farmers burned 5,000,000 lbs. of them in eastern Idaho in giant bonfires fueled by straw and kerosene. If the price does not rise promptly, say the farmers, they will destroy another...
Linked up head and tail like circus elephants by their "escape ropes," each humping half a hundredweight of gear,* the muzzles of their rifles still taped to keep out gunk, the scouts took advantage of distant artillery salvos to mask their footfalls on the way back to a prearranged retrieval zone. Brown, in the lead, groped his way back through the blackness by memorizing the map and counting his own steps; each time his left foot hit the ground 67 times, he calculated the team had covered 100 meters. Back at the landing zone, Brown's whispered message filtered...
...consumer food increase." Of 50 newsmen, only a reporter for the New York Times interpreted this to mean that I was "pleased with a decrease in farm prices." The others understood that I was glad to see pork prices moderate from an abnormal high of $30 per hundredweight, or 122% of parity, for the reason that if the price had remained long at such a level it would have resulted in overproduction of hogs, a glutted market, and ultimately depressed prices to hog producers. Precipitous increases and declines in farm prices are always damaging...
...linear, chain and nautical), and a bewildering variety of dry and liquid measurements, ranging from drachms, grains and scruples to tuns, hogsheads and chaldrons. Port is measured in pipes (105 gals.), people in stones (14 Ibs.), pickled peppers in pecks (554.84 cu. in.). For good measure, Britain's hundredweight is 112 Ibs., not 100; the pennyweight has been unrelated to the weight of any penny for a century and a half, but equals one-twentieth of an ounce. Both ounces and quarts have entirely different values in different tables, and pounds can consist either of 12 oz. (troy...