Just talked with my father-in-law, who is in contact with several people on wheat harvest. Yields are miserable this year, in the wheat growing plains states, on account of the drought and late freeze. Yields are being reported from 0 - 20 bu/acre.
One crew loaded up combines and trucks and headed home. Losing money on the harvesting, not to mention the loss to the farmers.
Hmmmm, wonder what this will do to supermarket prices?
Cinch up those Belts Charlie
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Excerpt:
The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans ?to change from an economy of waste?and this country has been notorious for waste?to an economy of conservation.? A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call.
The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation ethos was the victory garden. Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national ?Food Fights for Freedom? campaign.
By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation?s vegetables?freeing the nation?s farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia. In The Garden Is Political, a 1942 volume of popular verse, poet John Malcolm Brinnin acclaimed these ?acres of internationalism? taking root in U.S. cities. Although suburban and rural gardens were larger and usually more productive, some of the most dedicated gardeners were inner-city children. With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions, and settlement houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant lots in major industrial cities were turned into neighborhood gardens that gave tenement kids the pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000 schoolchildren enlisted in the ?Clean Up for Victory? campaign, which salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.
Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn?t yet exist) and self-reliance. In Los Angeles, flowers (?a builder of citizen morale?) were included in the ?Clean-Paint-Plant? program to transform the city?s vacant spaces, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden taught the principles of ?garden culture? to local schoolteachers and thousands of their enthusiastic students."