The biggest wheat raiser in Texas and one of the biggest in the U. S. called his creditors together two months ago and told them he was broke. Last week a rural hardware store to which he owed $600 petitioned him into receivership.
The farmer was Hickman Price. Four years ago he gave up a $50,000-a-year job with Fox Film Corp. to raise wheat on an industrial scale. His new neighbors in the Texas Panhandle chortled at the idea. But in 1931 they came from miles around to see the Price Plant in full blast (TIME, July 27, 1931). If they laughed then it was because of his vast, Bunyanesque scale of operations. Out in the field he had 25 silver-painted combines and 50 tractors, working day & night. Caravans of trucks lumbered to market with his wheat. Five messengers on motorcycles wove through the dust of three big Texas counties bearing messages for his field foremen, his mechanics, his troublespotters. When harvest was over that year and the 22,000 acres of Hickman Price's land lay in stubble, he had raised a half-million bushels of wheat and harvested most of it.
This year bad luck dogged him from the first seeding. In March a biting frost swept through the Panhandle, nipped his young sprouts. Then came fierce storms which pelted his fields with hail, knocking the kernels from their soft sheaves. Cutworms invaded his empire, devouring life-giving roots. Long, hot, cloudless weeks baked his rich soil until surviving stalks of wheat withered and died. When harvest time came most of his silver combines and tractors remained in his sheds. Only 3,000 acres had a crop worth reaping. They yielded but 11 bu. per acre.
Because most farmers resent being told things can be done in a better way, they resent large-scale farming. Because Hickman Price was an Easterner and no farmer, the resentment was increased. Newspapers in the West headlined the story of the Eastern industrialist's woes.
Proponents of industrialized farming saw little significance in Hickman Price's receivership. They pointed out that it was weather, not prices which ruined him. They feel that with fair conditions and, perhaps, more operating experience, Hickman Price could have raised wheat cheaply enough to weather even last week's low prices. They see a lesson in the fact that he failed to diversify his crops. Such large-scale farmers as Montana's Thomas Donald Campbell believe that farm corporations of the future must own land in three or more parts of the U. S. to insure themselves against failure because of rust in Nebraska, rain in Alberta, drought in Kansas or hail in Texas.