94 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



price of wheat was removed and wheat dropped precipitately, thus laying 

 among wheat farmers firm foundations for an era of discontent. 15 



The wartime boom in wheat was paralleled closely by a similar expan- 

 sion of the corn-livestock industry. The heaviest items of meat export 

 from the United States to Europe, both before and during the war, were 

 pork and pork products, especially lard. With regard to these items the 

 same as with wheat, the war did not so much serve to open up a new type 

 of market for American produce abroad as to accentuate an already exist- 

 ing market. About 12 per cent of American pork and pork products had 

 been shipped overseas in the prewar years, and during the war this propor- 

 tion was approximately doubled. The average lard export from the United 

 States to Great Britain during the five prewar years was about 450,000,000 

 pounds; by 1919 it was over a billion pounds. 16 



The effect of the acute wartime demand upon livestock producers was 

 in most respects similar to its effect on the growers of wheat. But there 

 were differences. A constant factor in the livestock industry that had no 

 parallel in the wheat industry was the relation between the price of corn 

 and the price of livestock, particularly hogs. If the price of corn rose more 

 rapidly than the price of hogs, the tendency was for the farmer to sell his 

 hogs rather than to buy expensive corn to fatten them. Corn prices were 

 affected not only by the demand for feed, but also by the size and quality 

 of the corn crop in a given year and by the export demand, which shot up 

 considerably during the war period. Principally because of two bad years, 

 1916 and 1918, corn production during the war showed practically no in- 

 crease over prewar years. There was some importation of Argentine corn, 

 but this was more than offset by wartime exportation to Europe. As a 

 result of these various factors, corn prices tended, from the feeders' point 

 of view, to be abnormally high in proportion to the price obtainable for 

 hogs. In the fall of 1914, for example, corn sold for nearly seventy-five 

 cents a bushel, much too high a price to justify feeding it to hogs, which 

 were then selling at the comparatively low price of about $8.00 per hun- 

 dredweight. According to a well-established rule-of-thumb ratio current 



15. Ibid., pp. 283; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1923, p. 181; F. M. 

 Surface, The Grain Trade during the World War (New York, 1928), p. 459; E. G. 

 Nourse, American Agriculture and the European Market (New York, 1924), p. 79. 



16. Genung, in Farmers in a Changing World, pp. 286-87. 



