Each month during the growing season the Secretary of Agriculture receives in specially marked and colored envelopes figures on crop conditions and prospects from 120,000 crop reporters throughout the land. This great bundle of reports, from which official U. S. crop estimates will later be distilled, the Secretary stows away in a great safe. No government documents are accorded greater secrecy; a "leak" might enable grain and cotton speculators to make large and illegitimate profits. On estimate day (generally the tenth of the month) the Crop Board under William Forrest Callander...
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