Word: wheated
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...swing in the price of, say, soybeans, which were selling last week for as much as $6.58 per bu. But the speculative market performs an essential function: it helps give stability, or at least predictability, to the future price of grain. That enables everyone from Nebraska wheat growers to Boston bakers to make intelligent forecasts. Each one can determine just how much he will have to spend to buy or, conversely, how much he can count on receiving for selling, grain as much as 14 months into the future. The futures contracts that are traded on the commodity exchanges enable...
...large grain trading companies and food corporations like General Mills and ITT Continental Baking Co. Countless more ordinary investors are in the market hoping to make quick and stunning profits. If they are wrong, speculators must be prepared to lose big. Anyone who bet last autumn that January wheat prices would be headed up, and bought the maximum permissible number of 600 wheat futures contracts, could have lost $600,000 in a single day last week. Conversely, anybody who had correctly bet months ago that prices would decline in January, would have reaped rich profits...
Just as good earth and climate around Epernay, France, provide nature's ideal spot for nurturing champagne grapes, the Midwest's long growing season, heavy spring or summer rains and rich, two-foot-deep topsoil are perfect for grain cultivation. Kansas and Oklahoma are wheat country. Just north in the hardy soil of Illinois and Iowa lie the great corn belt and vast fields of soybeans. Farther north, in the Dakotas and Minnesota, grow wheat, soybeans, sugar beets. Here is the richest farm land east of Eden, where the biblical seven years of bountiful harvests are usually followed...
...most advanced and productive sectors of the American economy. Mechanization has vastly expanded his reach. As late as 1955 there were more horses and mules than tractors in American farmyards. Now there are 4.4 million tractors on 2.7 million farms. A U.S. farmer today can seed 300 acres of wheat a day, vs. 85 acres in 1950. Meanwhile, land grant state universities, which were started under a program of President Lincoln's, have researched and spread technological breakthroughs. Out of the agricultural experiment stations in the early 1930s came means of cross-pollinating two types of purebred corn...
These innovations created spectacular crops. Since 1940 the American wheat yield per acre has more than doubled, from 15.3 bu. to 34.2 bu., and the corn output has almost quadrupled, from 28.4 bu. to 109.2 bu. Soybeans, which grow lavishly in the same weather and soil conditions as corn, expanded spectacularly. Production increased from 555 million bu. in 1960 to 2.2 billion bu. last year. While a Soviet farmer grows 45 bu. of corn an acre, his American counterpart produces...