Word: wheat
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...With wheat prices declining President Hoover was last week requested by Senators Capper and Allen of Kansas, candidates for re-election in November, to instruct the Federal Farm Board to purchase 100,000,000 bu. more wheat to "stabilize the market...
Last week it was 110° in the wheat fields of Kansas and Iowa. Politically it was even hotter as wheat prices slumped to the lowest level in 17 years, 60¢ per bu. locally, 86¢ at Chicago. To escape a brassy sun harvesters worked by moonlight. By day, horses heaved and died by the score. The grain turned white, the ground cracked open. But the threat of a burned crop and reduced production was not sufficient to revive wilting prices...
Into this Midwest oven last week went Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Mastick Hyde and Chairman of the Farm Board Alexander Legge to preach the gospel of wheat acreage reduction. Before they left Washington they solemnly warned wheat producers that ahead of them lay seven lean years with "world wheat prices . . . appreciably lower than in the last seven years" (TIME, July 14). Secretary Hyde, comparing himself with Paul Revere, declared: "We are posted as sentries on the lookout towers to see what is coming. We would be derelict in our duty if we didn't warn the farmers...
Messrs. Legge and Hyde opened their campaign at Hastings, Neb. The thermometer stood at 100°. Declared Chairman Legge: "A 25% reduction [in wheat acreage] will put production on a domestic basis. Reduce the acreage of wheat, without regard to what is done with the land thus released. You can put this land into grass for the benefit of your children. Do anything with it but don't raise wheat on it. ... If a great majority of producers could act collectively, adjustment in production becomes easy...
...This is the life!' trilled buxom Marion Nevada Talley, onetime Metropolitan Opera soprano, as she plumped into the seat of a harvester combine and prepared to help bring in a wheat crop estimated at 200,000 bushels on her ranch at Colby...