The Great Harvest

This was going to be the biggest wheat crop in U.S. history. The weather had stayed good (TIME, June 19); now in the choking, dusty fields and in broiling sun, the harvest was on. Oklahoma was already piling its record 80 million bushels in the terminal elevators. In Kansas, 185 million bushels awaited the northward sweep of the crawling combines. Providentially, the bonanza had come just when the U.S. had been dangerously close to a critical grain shortage.

Nature had been good, the sun and the skies kind, the land fruitful. The next great problem was manpower. Could the U.S. harvest the biggest wheat crop it had ever grown, when most of its men were off to the war or war plants? This question was being answered -- childpower and womanpower and old-manpower were reaping the great harvest.

Farmers solved their help problem by putting their families to work: bronzed ten-and eleven-year-olds drove the jouncing tractors while their fathers shouted directions from the combines. At every busy country elevator, half the farm trucks bringing in grain from the fields were driven by women.

The next great problem was to haul the harvest. Could the railroads do it? Usually the Santa Fe, largest U.S. wheat carrier, spots 10,000 wheat cars at key junction points for the harvest. But last week the Santa Fe, which owns 35,000 boxcars, could spare only 889. All other cars were carrying high-priority freight up & down the nation.

Beset by its own labor shortages, the Santa Fe desperately sent whistling freights shuttling back & forth across the dusty prairies. At Enid, Okla., lean, hard-driving Foreman Tom Ingles set a goal of switching a car a minute, and made it.

Division Trainmaster Frank Dickenson, red-eyed from lack of sleep, arrived from headquarters at Arkansas City, and sweated out 18 hours a day at trouble shooting.

Grubby local freights worked through the warm nights, setting out empty cars on country sidings, picking up loaded cars from the local grain elevators at Yewed, Jet, Oakwood and Cherokee.

Within the next six weeks, a whopping 187,000 carloads of wheat will be dumped on the overworked railroads serving the Southwest. Besides their own problems, railroads are slowed by delays at Kansas City elevators, where the labor shortage has cut the speed of unloading cars by one-third.

In this year of plenty, with so much wheat and so many transport troubles, thousands of bushels will remain piled high in the fields after the harvest, or be stored in empty village buildings. But the wheat will still be good, and the nation will need it.

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