Word: harvests
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This was going to be the biggest wheat crop in U.S. history. The weather had stayed good (TIME, June 19); now in the choking, dusty fields and in broiling sun, the harvest was on. Oklahoma was already piling its record 80 million bushels in the terminal elevators. In Kansas, 185 million bushels awaited the northward sweep of the crawling combines. Providentially, the bonanza had come just when the U.S. had been dangerously close to a critical grain shortage...
Nature had been good, the sun and the skies kind, the land fruitful. The next great problem was manpower. Could the U.S. harvest the biggest wheat crop it had ever grown, when most of its men were off to the war or war plants? This question was being answered - childpower and womanpower and old-manpower were reaping the great harvest...
...good year since 1919. By day, the farmers fretted over the things that could go wrong. Hail storms or heavy rain could lay whole fields flat. A spell of 100-degree heat might cause the grain to shatter. Some times insects scourged the land just before the harvest...
...Harvest Army. Already the wide north ward sweep of the harvest has begun in Texas and Oklahoma and is moving for ward like an army with its flanks spread wide. By late June it will reach Kansas, then thresh slowly up from the heartland of the U.S., until by September it spends itself on the windy prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta...
Moving with the harvest are thousands of workers. Sometimes a man, his wife and a daughter old enough to drive a truck operate a single traveling combine. But other migratory crews are big enough to include a fleet of truckers, factory-trained combine repairmen and rolling cookshacks. Corps of "semi-pro" harvest ers move from field to field "custom combining" the wheat at $3 & up an acre, operating fleets of new, self-propelled combines, each able to cut 50 acres of grain a day. Their work plans are as precise as army logistics; their bookings and daily routings are scheduled...