The Wheat Boom That Carried a Bust in Its Backwash
As six-bit wheat enriched the Palouse, a farm editor warned that debt and one-crop farming were setting up another 1893-style crash.
A wave of prosperity has struck the Palouse country. It has come through a remarkable and unusual combination of good crops and high prices for wheat. There is great danger that the backwash of this tidal wave will leave us as badly stranded on the shore of adversity as we were left in 1893. Six-bit wheat is by no means an unmixed good to this country. In '91 and '92 it encouraged the farmers to go in debt; and debt ruined them. Prosperity based on extreme prices for wheat is as uncertain as life, and as unreliable as an epitaph. The danger of depending on one product alone is an oft-told tale, a song so hackneyed that it has become wearisome to the ear, and yet the lesson is not learned. Already sure signs of coming disaster are appearing, not in the skies, but in the stores. Already the merchants in this town, surrounded by a purely agricultural country, have to send East for hog products; already butter is hard to get and eggs scarce; already the butchers of Spokane are importing cattle from Montana and dressed meat from farther East.
What does this mean? It means that we are not producing enough for our own consumption of those things we ought above all others to produce. It means that when another era of low-priced wheat, or a wet harvest, comes upon us, we will be as unprepared as we were in 1893. It means that by and by we will be selling our only product, wheat, at the cost of production or less, and sending the hard-earned money out of the country for necessaries of life which we should produce.
It is the old story; wheat, wheat, wheat! True, it is more profitable now than anything else on the farm, excepting perhaps poultry and fruit. But is that any reason why we should denude our fields of cattle and our pens of swine? Some time we shall need them and the income from them. The need will come suddenly, but it takes time to build up such industries, and meanwhile we will go through another such siege as during the past four years. Paste this in your hat or on your kitchen wall and look at it frequently. Not every year, nor any two years in succession, will all countries but ours be short on wheat. When India, the Argentine and Russia are once more competing with us in the wheat market of the world, we will again realize that no political party, no financial scheme of gold standard, bimetallism or greenbacks can save us from trouble if we depend alone on wheat. — Palouse Ex.
“Prosperity based on extreme prices for wheat is as uncertain as life, and as unreliable as an epitaph.”
The 1890s warning from the Palouse sounds familiar in a Valley that still stakes much of its economy on a few cash crops. Then as now, high prices can hide the fragility of a place that imports too much of what it eats and depends on distant markets.
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