Word: wheats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These days, few individual farmers can afford to own their own combines. The price is edging up to $50,000. Besides, in wheat country, combines are used for only a few days during harvest. So farmers turn to combine cutters, also jeeringly known as "wheaties," who hire themselves out, along with their families and their combines. Small is a custom cutter, one of several thousand men who begin their summer combine run in mid-May, cutting down in Texas, and then follow the rhythm of the ripening wheat up through Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas and Montana...
...Small children all share the common desire to spend just one summer back home in Missouri. "I don't expect I'd like it much," Byron admits, "but I'd sure like to see what it's like." Many children who inhabit the wheat belt have a secret desire to spend a summer roaming from state to state with the cutters. The Smalls each year employ 14 hired boys (including Byron). The members of the crew live in motel rooms, paid for by the Smalls, eat bountifully of the well-prepared home cooking around the tables...
Working summers cutting wheat and October through Christmas harvesting soybeans in Mississippi, the family should gross nearly $400,000. But on-the-road expenses gobble up more than a third of that. The bank, which holds mortgages on $100,000 worth of trucks, takes...
...wheat prices rise or fall according to world supply. Last year wheat was plentiful, and the prices sank to $2 a bushel...
Farmers around Circle were discouraged by that, and many of them plowed their wheat under rather than pay to have it harvested. This year there is a big U.S. crop, but also Government supports and the hope of a heavy overseas sale. The price is $3 a bushel, not enough to turn a farmer's thoughts to a new Mercedes, but enough to turn a slight profit...