Read it Again – Week of Feb. 8, 2001

80 years ago this week.

The U.S. Bureau of Markets reports that the average price paid per hundredweight for milk in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin ranged from $2.10 to $3.92. However, Oscar Erf, of the Ohio college of agriculture, said in certain sections of western Ohio, farmers were compelled to accept as low as $1.40 per hundredweight for their milk.

50 years ago this week.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike is a project that many can view with satisfaction. When it finally is completed, persons will find pleasure in traveling the wide highway, enjoying the beautiful country through which they pass, unmindful of the damage and inconvenience the turnpike caused the farmer.

The highway cuts through many farms. Occasionally sufficient land remains so that farming may be carried on, though on a smaller scale. A farmer may have lost a parcel of land, only to pick up additional acreage from a neighbors farm. But in other cases, so much land will have been severed from the main farm buildings that a farmer will have no choice but to retire from farming

C.L. Kuhn once kept 17 hogs, 14 head of cattle and 250 chickens on his small 31-acre farm. Only two cows and four heifers remain; of these, the heifers shortly will be sold. In addition the farm has been divided into four sections.

“I have raised seven children on this farm and invested my whole life’s earnings in it, and now we’re beaten out of it,” Mr. Kuhn reports. “I received an offer but it was so low it would all go for lawyer’s fees if I fought this case in court.”

25 years ago this week.

Heavy world demand is likely for U.S. wheat and rice in the upcoming year, according to reports at the USDA in Washington, D.C. Frank Gourse, commodity analyst with ERS, stated that a record 1975 U.S. wheat crop of 2,138 million bushels is in prospect U.S. export sales for the entire crop year are currently forecast in a range of 1.3 – 1.4 billion bushels. This would be a new record high and would account for almost 50 percent of the world’s projected 1975-76 trade in wheat.

Gourse added that wheat prices likely will continue to fluctuate in the area of $4 a bushel in the near term.