My grandpa was offered to be paid to let the harvested corn just rot, so it was after harvest.
It boggles my mind how little people are aware of this kind of practice. The Who even wrote a “joke” song about it in the 70s:
Well, I farmed for a year and grew a crop of corn
That stretched as far as the eye can see
That’s a whole lot of cornflakes
Near enough to feed New York till 1973
Cultivation is my station and the nation
Buys my corn from me immediately
And holding sixty thousand bucks, I watch as dumper trucks
Tip New York’s corn flakes in the sea
~~
Well, my pick and spade are rusty
Because I’m paid on trust
To leave my square of cornfield bare
Probably to keep from ripping up the top soil during the harvest. Kind of counterintuitive to use less farmland and to produce less when the price is high, but same thing works with oil fields - you get more the slower you pump.
How would letting harvested corn rot in piles use less farmland? Definitely keeps prices high though.
Oh, I thought you were talking about not harvesting the corn once it was ready.
federal government literally paid farmers to not harvest crops
If it was already harvested and then left to rot, that was market manipulation of some sort. Maybe Grangers and breaking the rail monopolies? Though I think they did the whole “left harvested food to rot” bit in the late 1800s, not early 1900s
