yew Wheat and Old

New Wheat and Old

New Crop. From Minnesota through the Dakotas and Montana to Washington and Oregon, Northwestern grain growers were last week rounding out their planting of this year's spring wheat crop. From Washington, D. C, Federal Farm Board Chairman Alexander Legge appealed to them over the radio to reduce their wheat acreages by 10% as a cooperative means of cutting the 1930 crop surplus. Ground was already broken, seed on hand. Not before summer will the Department of Agriculture be able to estimate whether northwest wheat men followed Chairman Legge's advice or whether his warning-plea reached them too late.

Winter Crop. Meanwhile the condition of the 1930 winter wheat crop in the southwest, planted last Autumn in abundance when the Farm Relief Act was hopefully new and before the Farm Board had called for acreage cuts, caused a price flurry in the Chicago wheat pit. Drought and hot winds threatened a reduced yield, sent July prices up 10-c- per bushel. Then came rains over the winter wheat area and quotations slumped back to last week's closing of $1.07 per bu.

Incubus. But the Farm Board and its two wheat-dealing agencies, Farmers National Grain Corp. and Grain Stabilization Corp., were much less interested in the 1930 crop which they have promised not to touch on the market, than they were in the great 1929 crop, an incubus under which they still labored. The two grain corporations, interlocking in personnel and activity, had bought in some 45 or 50 million bushels of wheat, of which 15 million were futures for May delivery (TIME. March 10). Wheat bins were already choked in Chicago and Minneapolis. Delivery date had almost come. Chairman Legge had insisted that Stabilization Corp's acceptance of these deliveries would clear it of any charge of speculation. But Stabilization Corp. was last week torn with uncertainty: should it accept May deliveries at distant points? Should it postpone them until July, risking collision with the incoming 1930 crop?

Shakeup. The Government wheat problem was further confused by a shakeup, more important than appeared on the surface, within the Farm Board's agencies. Last December National Grain Corp. hired William G. Kellogg as general manager. Mr. Kellogg had been a Minneapolis cash grain dealer. His brother John had been involved in the Armour Grain Corp. fiasco which caused his suspension for two years from the Chicago Board of Trade. Early this year when wheat broke badly Grain Corp., with the Farm Board's sanction, organized Stabilization Corp. to go into the pit and trade on U. S. funds. William Kellogg was made its president. Who endorsed him the Farm Board declines to reveal but Chicagoans imagine he had political backing from Wisconsin. He conducted his trading through his brother John, now reinstated, with much swagger. Their operations in the pit caused much lifting of eyebrows among veteran traders. Their efforts to bull wheat to the peg price of $1.18 failed. When the price rose on dry weather reports, the Kelloggs sold Government wheat heavily, took a profit, helped to produce the next slump, arouse the ire of growers. This month Stabilization Corp. held its first annual meeting, reduced Mr. Kellogg to a vice president. Selected for president after a vain search among big grain men for a No. 1 executive was one George Sparks Milnor, an able, honest, small-scale miller of Alton, Ill.

Last week Mr. Kellogg was permitted to resign as both general manager of Grain Corp. and vice president of Stabilization Corp. The customary excuse was used: "The pressure of other affairs which will require his undivided attention." But there were few wheat men in Chicago who did not believe that Mr. Kellogg, despite his three-year contract, had been eased out because of the botch he had made of U. S. wheat trading, the ill will he had engendered among growers and dealers alike.

Last week, as a sample of disorganized Stabilization Corp. affairs, it was discovered that the U. S. had bought $120,000 worth of wheat through Continental Grain Corp. of Minneapolis but had failed to demand a warehouse receipt. Not until Continental went into bankruptcy was it found that the receipt had been hypotheticatecal as collateral by Continental for its own speculative trading. President Milnor's first announcement was that Stabilization Corp. had recovered the receipt for its grain.

Angry Farmers. Primary purpose of the Farm Board's Grain Corp. was to unite wheat growers into great cooperatives to manage the sale of their own crop. Despite the claims of Grain Corp. officials that this organization was going forward satisfactorily, there were new evidences last week that many husbandmen, always individualistic, were hostile to such groups. Reprints of rural newspaper advertisements against the Board were broadcast. A sample from the Central City (Neb.) Republican signed FRED A. MARSH. FARMER of Archer, Regent of Nebraska State University:

"The Farm Board, in a manner that has left but a train of more and greater depressed prices, after their every idiotic action, is unmanning the staple methods of handling our grain. . . . The Farm Board's efforts to soviet the raising and handling of farm products in America will come true if they are not curbed. All liberty of the American farmer will be annulled by a drastic policy of cooperatively controlled acreage. . . . We have just gone through the horrors of a banking commission trying to administer our banking business [TIME, March 31]. Must we now endure the same agonies in regard to our American-raised grain by this swashbuckling Farm Board?"

Drive. In various parts of the wheat country, notably in Minneapolis, foes of the Farm Board were last week preparing a drive against it, a move toward repealing the law which set it up, in the form of resolutions to be submitted at next week's meeting of the National Chamber of Commerce.

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