1917 | Agriculture
Agriculture
The Smith-Hughes Act signed into law by President Wilson February 23 provides federal funds for agricultural education in land-grant colleges.
U.S. wheat prices rise precipitously beginning in early spring as Allied governments, U.S. millers, and speculators bid up prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. Some 570 million bushels (92 percent) of the 620-million-bushel crop have left the farms by March and have been marketed before the price rise, so few farmers share in the bonanza.
Kansas-born agronomist-geneticist Donald F. (Forsha) Jones, 27, successfully combines two single-cross hybrid corn (maize) varieties in a double cross, or four-way, combination that results in a new variety that is uniform and highly productive. Jones has studied under Edward M. East at Harvard and will produce the first hybrid sweet corn in 1924 (see East and Shull, 1921; Golden Bantam, 1933).
Drought begins on the Western plains.
Twine binder inventor John F. Appleby dies at Mazomanie, Wisconsin, November 8 at age 77.