Selling Grain in Town

January 25, 1932  Corney and I took a load of wheat to Meade.  We got 32 cents per bushel.  The children did laundry.  In the afternoon it began to snow.

Cornelius had a small granary on the farm, so he usually saved some wheat from the harvest to sell later when the price would be higher.  Farmers were still somewhat self-sufficient, meaning that they mostly ate what they produced on the farm and made most of their own clothes and did virtually all of the labor on the farm.  But by the 1930s, they needed cash to buy a tractor, implements, a car, lumber, fabric for clothing, shoes, a kitchen stove and utensils, furniture, and many other things.  Selling wheat (along with cream, eggs, fryers, and garden vegetables) was the main source of cash for the family. 

This was no grain truck that they drove to town.  Cornelius and his son Corney would have driven the five miles to town in their Model A car, pulling a trailer with sideboards full of wheat.  There were two competing elevators in Meade, the co-op that was owned by all the member-farmers of the area and the commercial Gano elevator.  Many farmers sold only to the co-op because they were members there, but Cornelius liked to do business with both because sometimes the commercial elevator would offer better prices.  He probably had a few things that needed to be purchased in town as well.

But there was another very important purpose to these trips to town.  Cornelius loved to visit, and he would talk to anyone who had time, from the poorest ne’er-do-well to the richest man in town.  He certainly would have talked with workers and other farmers at the elevator and people at the stores.  He may have seen some acquaintances on the street and stopped to talk to them.  He visited with Mennonites and “English” alike.  And then he and Corney returned home with all the news of the community and a little cash in his pocket.