100 years ago in Spokane: Northwest farmers flinch at announced wheat prices

President Woodrow Wilson made a decision bitterly disappointing to Inland Northwest wheat farmers. Wilson fixed the price of the 1917 wheat crop at $2.20 a bushel.

This meant, in effect, a price of about $1.80 or $1.85 per bushel for Washington wheat, since the freight to Chicago would cost 30 or 40 cents a bushel. The $2.20 fixed price was based on a bushel delivered to Chicago.

A grower of one of the region’s largest wheat crops said that Northwest wheat farmers had been led to expect at least $2 per bushel. Even that, he said, would not really have been enough. He said most of the wheat grown in the Northwest cost the farmers $2.50 per bushel to produce.

He predicted that more American farmers will “flock to the Canadian wheat fields,” where growers are being paid $2.25 per bushel.

Wilson took the unusual step of fixing the price of wheat as a wartime measure. It was part of a broad initiative to prevent wartime price gouging and to ensure sufficient supplies of wheat for both domestic consumption and for war-torn Europe.

Yet it was a difficult balancing act.

“Members of the committee (which recommended the price) said today that they expected a great deal of criticism from the farming classes, but that they felt that every farmer should consider himself a part of the war machinery of the government and willing to relinquish a part of his profits in the interest of the common good,” the paper reported.