No Place to Go

All through the Texas Panhandle and the south plains, the combines lumbered south along the country roads. Like engines of war massing for an offensive, they clustered in town squares, ballparks and filling-station driveways. Their crews sat in tents and trailers, cursing the thunderstorms that turned the wheatfields into quagmires. In the few fields that dried out, the first combines scythed their way north across the waving grain. This week, the second biggest winter wheat harvest (an estimated 1,021,000,000 bushels v. 1947's alltime record of 1,068,000,000) in U.S. history would get underway.

Fear the Devil. The bumper harvest brought a big problem to all U.S. wheat farmers, and it was not the weather; it was what to do with the crop. There was no place to store it. Most of the nation's bins and elevators were still bulging with last year's wheat. The situation in Texas was typical: there was enough storage space to hold around 140 million bushels, but three-fifths of it was already filled with 1948 wheat and grain sorghums. That meant there was only room for this year's first 55 million bushels, not even half the expected Texas harvest. The farmers feared that the hindmost half might go to the devil.

The nightmarish prospect bestrode the dreams of all grain men, of the harassed Commodity Credit Corp., and of Congressmen who were frightened of the political repercussions of a wheat glut. The CCC, which now owns most of the old crops still on hand, had been doing its best to move it out of storage and to the Gulf ports in the hope of increasing export. But there was a limit on how fast it could be moved. This week, the Association of American Railroads, unwilling to let its cars get tied up with orphan wheat, embargoed all shipments which did not have storage space reserved in advance.

Pray for Grace. Both the CCC and most farmers had been counting on Congress to authorize emergency storage. But it appeared that the 81st Congress, like its predecessor, would not do anything in time to be of much help. The House had passed a conference bill which would let the CCC build more storage facilities, but last week the Senate turned it down, ostensibly on a technicality. (Oklahoma's Elmer Thomas charged it was torpedoed by private grain storage interests.)

For months, the CCC had been warning farmers to build their own storage bins., Not many had done so. Most farmers would have to look, as they had always done, to the country elevators--and soon they would have to look elsewhere. Many farmers would have no place to put their wheat but on the ground, and nothing to do but pray that rain, rats and rot would spare it.

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