Who Builds the Bins?

As the harvest of the new wheat crop began in Texas and Oklahoma last week, Department of Agriculture officials started to worry. Where will the U.S. put the wheat?

Already in storage is a huge carryover of 575 million bushels of wheat and 800 million bushels of corn. With the winter wheat crop estimated at 750 million bushels and the corn at 3.1 billion bushels, some officials predicted a repetition of the 1949 glut, when stacks of wheat had to be left out on open fields. To try to make room, agriculture officials are storing wheat in 75 mothballed ships on the Hudson River and in 50 more on the James River at Norfolk, Va.

Last week Under Secretary of Agriculture True D. Morse called an emergency conference on corn-storage problems in Des Moines and urged farmers to build more storage bins of their own. Said he: "We are moving forward on the premise that grain storage should not be run by the Government. It should be stored . . . on the farm, and when it leaves the farm, it should be handled by commercial people ... I fear that if the Government must resort to buying bins and putting them up to store corn, we will have to look at the bins in the future as monuments to the failure of free enterprise."

In the grain country, Morse's statement was coldly received. The grain men thought the Government should provide storage facilities, as it has for years. Storing wheat is especially attractive to farmers now that the spread between the market price of wheat and the Government-loan price is the greatest on record. The farmer could sell his wheat in Chicago last week for around $2.04 a bushel. But if he stored it, he could borrow $2.54 from the Government, pledging the grain as security. If prices do not rise, he can let the Government take his wheat. One hitch: grain is eligible for support only if it is stored in Government-approved places.

The following day, Morse got word of the grumbling in the grain belt. Mindful that President Truman had blamed the G.O.P. in 1948 for lack of storage facilities, Morse hastily "clarified" his staement. The Government, he said, has no intention of getting 'out of the storage business right away, may even buy more bins to handle this year's wheat and corn urpluses. He pointed out that it would be "good business" for the farmer to build more storage capacity, so that he could have the grain on hand and ready to market if the price went up. Furthermore, the Government was ready to lend 80% of the cost of the new bins built by the farmer, and would pay him 13-c- a bushel for storing last years corn for another year.

To demonstrate that "freeing butter from support prices would immediately double consumption and completely solve the butter problem," Albert Lowenfels president of Manhattan's Hotel Bar Butter Co., staged a one-day butter sale af a Manhattan supermarket last week. Price set: 55-c- a lb., the level to which Lowenfels thinks butter would go if left unsupported, compared with the going retail rate of 79-c-. Total sales for the day: 4, 9751bs., against average Friday sales of 600 Ibs. Net loss to Lowenfels to prove his point: about $2,300.

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