THE IMPACT OF WAR 93 



fixing could control the weather, and the total harvest for the year was 

 almost exactly the same as for 1916 only 650,828,000 bushels. Price fixing 

 had come too late to ensure for all the crop the high return which the 

 President had set. Estimates made by the Department of Agriculture 

 indicate that the average price per bushel actually received by the Amer- 

 ican producer for his wheat in 1917 was $i.44. 13 



As noted, the Food Administration Act of 1917 set a minimum price 

 of $2.00 per bushel for the 1918 crop in the hope that such a guaranteed 

 high price would ensure the bountiful yield that the Allied war effort so 

 greatly needed. The low yield of 1917 held American exports down to 

 138,000,000 bushels, and that figure was made possible only by the most 

 drastic economies at home. In 1918 crop conditions were better, and the 

 President, on June 21, 1918, used the authority given him in the Food 

 Control Act to raise the minimum price, this time to $2.26. The net result 

 was a harvest of 921,000,000 bushels, less by far than the bumper yield 

 of 1915 but still a phenomenally high figure. Of this crop, 287,000,000 

 bushels were shipped overseas. 14 



Although the fighting part of the war came to an end officially with 

 the armistice of November n, 1918, the European demand for American 

 wheat continued strong throughout 1919, and the government of the 

 United States maintained its price guarantee to the farmers. As a result, 

 the wheat sown was about 75,000,000 acres the highest in all American 

 history and the yield came to more than 967,000,000 bushels. Of this 

 crop about 220,000,000 bushels were exported. Strangely enough, the 

 American farmer assumed that the wartime expansion of his wheat mar- 

 ket abroad would continue indefinitely and made little effort to curtail 

 production, either by abandoning marginal land or by shifting to other 

 crops. In consequence, the wheat yield of 1920 was 833,000,000 bushels, a 

 figure that was approximated, more or less, each year throughout the 

 next decade. But neither the wartime market nor the European demand 

 which had helped to sustain it continued long after the war. Further- 

 more, at midnight on May 31, 1920, the government guarantee on the 



13. Ibid., p. 29; Simon Litman, Prices and Price Control in Great Britain and 

 the United States during the World War (New York, 1920), pp. 207-9, 219-21. 



14. Surface, Stabilization of the Price of Wheat, p. 17; Genung, in Farmers in a 

 Changing World, pp. 282-83. 



