How You Gonnan Keep It?

How You Gonna Keep It?

Winter wheat is ripening in Texas and Oklahoma. In a few weeks it will ripen in Kansas, later in the Dakotas. Farmers, oiling their combines, are about to confront the U.S. with the most colossal wheat surplus problem in its history.

The carryover from 1941 is 650,000,000 bushels, nearly twice the previous record. The spring and winter crop is likely to be a healthy 793,000,000 bushels at least. U.S. elevator and storage space is already 80% full. There is not enough room for this year's wheat. Question throughout the wheat trade last week: How you gonna keep it down on the farm?

In Minneapolis, CCCmen, AAAmen, railroaders, farmers, grain merchants and elevator men met to face the storage and transport problem. They found that:

> Northwest elevators, with storage capacity of 315,000,000 bu., are 80 to 90% filled with last year's carryover, will be short some 60 million bushels of storage space this year.

> With Lake shipping space needed to tote some 90,000,000 tons of iron ore, there is slight chance of duplicating last year's 11,000,000-ton grain shipment on the Lakes. Eastern seaboard elevators are brim full of wheat anyway, with no ships to carry it overseas.

> The railroads insist that no cars can be loaded unless they can be promptly unloaded. By fall, said one railroader, "We are going to have ten places to put boxcars for every boxcar we have got." Thus no cars can be used for storage purposes. Any shipper who tries it will be promptly embargoed.

For farmers the problem is serious. To get AAA loans, their wheat must be properly stored: in terminal, or country elevators, or on the farm. But Northwestern farmers already have some 70,000,000 bu. accumulated in makeshift storage bins, and much of this must soon be moved to better storage if it is to be saved.

Some help may come from lumber dealers, who have devised handy, prefabricated farm storage bins. And CCC may transfer from Iowa corn country some 17,000 steel bins used to store excess corn surpluses. (Big demand for hogs and alcohol have emptied these corn bins, which hold up to 70,000,000 bu.)

Meanwhile terminal elevators are bursting their seams, with little prospect of new construction. Said Agriculture's James E. Wells, who presided in Minneapolis last week: "Last year, we started with a 350,000,000-bushel wheat carryover. We filled up Baltimore, and we filled up Philadelphia, and we filled up Buffalo. Then down at Kansas City, they thought all we had to do to give them relief was to move about 15,000,000 bushels from Kansas City. Topeka had the same idea.

"At Enid, Okla. they thought everything would be solved; all we had to do was to move several million bushels out of Enid. At Omaha, it would be easy to handle the problem if we merely moved several million bushels away from there."

That problem was handled by hard-headed cooperation. In the northwest a voluntary committee of shippers, headed by E. J. Grimes (Cargill, Inc.), instituted a private priorities system. Grain in the worst condition, or in the leakiest bins, got first call on what elevator space was available.

But this year the problem is twice as tough. The Northwest railroads think they can handle it again--given the same cooperation, given new farm storage space, barring accidents. One such accident, mentioned in Minneapolis by CCC's regional director: suppose Alaska and Siberia become a theater of war? In that case the railroads might have no free cars to take wheat off the farms, even if there were elevator space to take it to.

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