Busy Week in Wheat

In a flurry of selling in the Chicago Board of Trade's grain pits last week, July wheat dropped about 4-c- to $1.97 3/4 a bu., lowest price in more than three years. At the start of this week it dropped another 10 cents a bushel. Chief reason: the Agriculture Department had raised its final estimate of the 1953 wheat crop to 1,132,500,000 bu., almost 100 million bu. higher than the estimate made a month earlier. This was more than enough to offset the week's more encouraging news, i.e., President Eisenhower's request that the U.S. send Pakistan 1,000,000 tons of wheat.

A bumper wheat crop, with the carryover, would give the U.S. the greatest supply of wheat in its history, and almost certainly force the Agriculture Department to cut back wheat planting next year--an unpopular move with farmers. But it seems unlikely that 1954 production could be shaved by more than 15%. The House Agriculture Committee last week approved a bill barring the Agriculture Department from cutting minimum acreage below 66 million acres (v. 55 million under present law), although acreage allotments have been under 66 million in five of "the six years in which they have been imposed since 1938.

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