The Numbers Game

At 7 o'clock one morning last week, seven sleepy-eyed members of the U.S. Crop Reporting Board trooped into a heavily guarded room in Washington's Department of Agriculture. The board sat down, for the first time this year, to the important task of estimating the nation's forthcoming cotton crop and updating the incomplete estimates on other crops. Just before 11 a.m., the big doors of the room swung open, and Chairman S. R. Newell strode across the hall to give newsmen the board's 1952 report. The news: The U.S. this year will have a near-record crop, probably surpassed in U.S. history only by the 1948 crop totals. Cotton (14.5 million bales) may be nearly 7% below last year's crop acreage, but corn (3.3 billion bu.) and wheat (1.2 billion bu.) are expected to be almost 14% and 26% higher, respectively.

The estimates, the chief yardstick used by farmers and grainmen to gauge future commodity prices, were received with some skepticism. There have been too many mistakes before in the department's arithmetic. The real skeptics were the cotton farmers. Last year the board's estimate of their crop was more than 2 million bales too high. Result: U.S. cotton farmers sold their crops in a falling market, according to Congressional investigators lost $125 million by selling before the short crop came in and prices rose.

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