Farmers and "the Wheat Problem"

[Espee]

I saw a photo of a billboard, showing a little girl with a pageboy, and it reads:

Your Child's Bread and Butter Can Solve The Wheat Problem

One Slice More Each Meal Will Do It

[a section obscured].... HELP for the FARMERS

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When might the photo have been taken?

[LizzieMaine]

Probably 1930-32, after the collapse of wheat prices. By the time the collapse bottomed out, wheat was going for less than 50 cents a bushel (it had been around $2 for much of the twenties), and farmers were finding it cheaper to burn it in their stoves than to take it to market.

[Treetopflyer]

Back when we had family farms. This was, oddly enough, a topic of discussion tonight at dinner about how factory farms have taken over for the family farm and how the product of the farm has changed because of it.

[filfoster]

Thank goodness this was before gluten allergies were diagnosed!

[dhermann1]

I believe the problem started right after WW I. Farmers were selling their products for huge amounts due to war demand, but when the war ended prices just kept sliding. There was a farm depression from the mid 20's, that predated and then merged into the greater depression in the 30's.
My old pal Harry Truman (I just finished reading his bio) was a victim of this. He opened up his famous haberdashery (or as he called it his "shirt store") around 1921 in his home town of Independence, Missouri. He prospered for a year or so, but then the drop in farm prices caught up with him. The store went out of business after another year.

[LizzieMaine]

A lot of commodity speculators got wiped out in that early '20s crash, along with farmers who never had any participation in "roaring Twenties"-style prosperity. The depression was just a continuation of misery for a lot of them, which explains why so many were willing to consider armed revolution by 1933. The image we have today of the Grant Wood-style Noble Rustic Man of The Soil should instead show him aiming his pitchfork at the throat of a judge who's just foreclosed on his farm.

[John in Covina]

Reminds me of the stories of oranges being dumped in the rivers and armed guards were employed to keep hungry people from getting them during the great depression

[Stanley Doble]

Milk was dumped in the rivers and on the ground, oranges were piled up and doused with kerosene so no one could eat them all on the orders of Roosevelt.

[LizzieMaine]

The idea was to drive commodity prices back up to give the farmers reason to keep on growing. The AAA was one of the bitterest pills of the Depression, but it did what it was intended to do.

[MisterCairo]

The idea was to drive commodity prices back up to give the farmers reason to keep on growing. The AAA was one of the bitterest pills of the Depression, but it did what it was intended to do.

Let people starve?