878 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



where many of the Japanese tenants have been involved in great loss 

 during the last two years. However, such instances are not common, 

 and some of the Japanese farmers have realized large profits and have 

 accumulated wealth rapidly. 



285. SPECULATION IN WHEAT-GROWING 1 



The wheat crop of the average Eastern or Middle West community 

 seldom involves more than a few thousand dollars; the average 

 field seldom means more than a few hundred acres. Whether the 

 wheat succeeds or fails will neither make nor break the Eastern or 

 Middle West farmer. Even if late spring rains delay seeding, the 

 ninety days required to grow and ripen a wheat crop will not bring 

 the crop into frost danger of the early fall. Even if your farmer is 

 delayed in putting in his crop till June, as many were this year, the 

 chances are a hundred to one that he will harvest, house, and market 

 his wheat before frost has limed the ground. But in the West, 

 in the event of such delay, chances are a hundred to one against 

 the farmer. The wheat crop is a gamble pure and simple. Big crops 

 mean big fortunes. A failure on a crop means ruin. You can talk 

 your head off to the farmer about the folly of depending on a one-crop 

 system, of putting all his eggs in one basket, and so forth. As long 

 as one year's crop may mean a fortune, Western farmers will chance 

 all on that one crop; and one year's big success on a Western wheat 

 farm does mean a fortune. It means the mortgage paid, or the cost 

 of the machinery paid, or a, brick house, or modern conveniences in 

 the house, or a motor car, or a winter trip "back East " or to California. 

 If it is a great success, it may mean all these things in one year. 



To begin with, the Western wheat fields are not sixty-acre checker- 

 board squares. They run from 160 acres the average homestead to 

 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 acres, as the old wheat fields of Texas and 

 California ran and as many wheat fields of Montana and Saskatchewan 

 today run. Such fields require an early start in spring and expensive 

 equipment in machinery. Much of the equipment is financed on 

 credit. It means tractor engines that plow forty acres a day and disc 

 and harrow in the same operation. It means tractors to draw the 

 harvester; and in the Walla Walla area are harvesters that reap, 

 thresh, and sack forty acres a day. The indebtedness of such a farm 

 for overhead expenses may run all the way from $2,000 to $20,000 

 for the season this purely for machinery, independently of the man- 

 power expense; and the man-power expense of a wheat farm during 



1 Adapted from Current Opinion, LXI (August, 1916), 133. 



