THE IMPACT OF WAR 9 1 



British economy was geared to manufacturing rather than to agriculture, 

 Great Britain had long imported greater quantities of wheat than did 

 any other nation in the world. The leading port of entry for this com- 

 modity was Liverpool, and for years the Liverpool price of wheat had 

 been recognized as the governing price for wheat, wherever it might be 

 sold. Most of Great Britain's agricultural land had long since been turned 

 into meadows and pasture, with possibly as little as 3 per cent of it in use 

 for the growing of bread grains. After the war began, when the Russian 

 wheat supply was cut off, there was much plowing up of ancient pastures 

 some of them hundreds of years old and much replanting, but the 

 main source of grain supply continued to be importation, principally from 

 the United States, Canada, and the Argentine. Heavy British buying on 

 the American market shot wheat prices upward with incredible speed. 

 The wildest day ever witnessed on the Chicago exchange was the day that 

 war was declared in Europe. By December, 1914, wheat was bringing 

 about twenty-three cents per bushel more than at the same time the pre- 

 ceding year, and in spite of a bumper crop Kansas alone harvested in 

 1914 almost twice as much wheat as the state had ever grown before 

 wheat prices continued to soar. By the spring of 1915 farmers at interior 

 points were getting as high as $1.25 to $1.40 per bushel for all the wheat 

 they could supply, and wheat exports from the United States were run- 

 ning to about $55,000,000 per month. 9 



The heavy demand and the high prices led naturally to a great expan- 

 sion of wheat sowing in the fall of 1914 and the spring of 1915. During 

 the decade that had preceded the war, the average annual acreage devoted 

 to the growing of wheat had been about 48,000,000 acres, of which 

 30,000,000 had been in winter wheat and 18,000,000 in spring wheat. In 

 the fall of 1914 the area sown to winter wheat was expanded by 5,000,000 

 acres, while in the spring of 1915 another extra 2,000,000 acres were sown 

 to spring wheat. During the year 1915 over 60,000,000 acres of wheat were 

 harvested, with a yield per acre that was phenomenally high. That year 

 the United States produced more than a billion bushels of wheat, the 

 greatest yield ever recorded up to that time and for many years to come. 



9. Ibid., XXXIX (August 14, 1914), p. mo; (September n, 1914), p. 1244; 

 (October 16, 1914), p. 1496; (December n, 1914), p. 1614; XLII (January 26, 1917), 

 p. 138; Genung, in Farmers in a Changing World, p. 281. 



