Crop Damage
As to the crops, we find many over-optimistic people trying to belittle positive crop damage. It cannot be belittled. It is dangerous and foolish to evade an issue instead of facing it. The argument that our surplus from last year will carry us through a shortage is puerile. That surplus has already been considered. Wheat in the bin is money; some of that money has already been spent and all of it has been given due consideration in the basing of our wealth. A number of writers attempt to make a probable crop of 2,500,000,000 bushels of corn a “bumper crop.” Their methods of arriving at this conclusion are not sound. It is certain that we should, in the natural course of events, raise more and more wheat and corn each year as the population of the world, and the uses of the cereals increase. To compare one year with another will not do. Particularly in Corn and Cotton must we steadily increase in acreage and production, for we supply the world with those commodities. To illustrate this point, let us go back a few years and see what has occurred.
COTTON AND CORN PRODUCTION
OF THE UNITED STATES FOR
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.
| Year | Bushels Corn | Bales Cotton |
| 1880 | 1,717,434,543 | 5,789,329 |
| 1885 | 1,936,176,000 | 6,550,215 |
| 1890 | 1,568,874,000 | 8,655,000 |
| 1895 | 2,151,139,000 | 7,157,340 |
| 1900 | 2,105,102,516 | 10,383,422 |
| 1905 | 2,707,993,542 | 11,345,988 |
| 1906 | 2,927,416,091 | 13,000,000 |
The time is very near at hand, when anything less than 3,000,000,000 bushels of corn will be a crop failure; and high prices cannot be considered a great compensation in lean years. Short crops mean decreased demand for labor and loss of purchasing power by the common people, who are after all the best spenders.—From Thomas Gibson’s Market Letter, July 13th, 1907.