Prosperity in War—Uncertainty in Peace: The Case of American Wheat Farmers

Idaho Wheat Farmer c.1920

Robert Marcell, Homestead National Monument of America

Once war erupted in Europe in 1914, farmers in the United States stood to make significant financial gains from the fighting going on across the Atlantic. In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan wrote that:

[N]o group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production. In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with the world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. 

When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States stepped in, and issued a proclamation to the plains: plant more wheat to win the war. And for the first time, the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel, through the war, backed by the wartime food administrator, a multimillionaire public servant named Herbert Hoover. Wheat was no longer a staple of a small family but a commodity with a price guarantee and a global market.

During the war, many small wheat farmers were making more money than the factory workers on Ford assembly lines (and about eight times more at that). Wealthier farmers, such as Kansas farmer Ida Watkins with her 2,000 acres of wheat, could do even better. Watkins bragged that she had made a profit of $75,000 one year, which was “bigger than the salary of any baseball player but Babe Ruth and more money than the president of the United States made.”

When the Dust Bowl Came to American Farms c.1930
(Bettmann/Getty)

The reason that this is in Egan’s award-winning book on the Dust Bowl is, of course, because this ramped-up farming—continued well after the end of the war—is what led in part to that great environmental catastrophe. . . Indeed, one of the questions raised by this paper is what role did [the war] play in the “Plow-Up” of the 1920s that led in part to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s? Nevertheless, with the future unknown, for the period of the war itself and in the years that shortly followed it seemed like a very good time to [farm].

Source:  Adapted from "World War I and the Homestead Act of 1862: When Farmers Fought and Soldiers Farmed for America’s Homestead States," by Robert Marcell, National Park Service Website