GUARDING AMERICAN CROP REPORTS

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 130, 26 February 1920, Page 5

GUARDING AMERICAN CROP REPORTS

HOW "SCOOPS" ARE PREVENTED.

Mr. Irving Chandler, writing in 'The Forecast" (New York), telis amusingly of the precautions that are taken to ensure that newspaper men shall have access to the crop reports of the United Slates Department of Agriculture at precisely the 6amo instant, and that one shall not seo them a second before the others. If the Government has not y«t reached the point of prohibiting speculation in foodstuffs, nays Mr. Chandler, it at least provides scrupulously for "a fair field and no favour. The report reveal to those Buying and selling grain, cotton, tobacco, «tc, the probable future supplies and the consequent trend of prices. Bribes too enormous to seem probable surely would be oftered for "inside" information at times, if there were any laxity in the handling of crop reports. But there is not. - The Government carries to an extreme Its protection of those figures which may seem to the average householder rather dry mysteries, but which are written in letters of gold and have the magic of guiding voices to the food speculators, Mr. Chandler continues. It locks the Crop Report Board into a room with guards Ftationed at the doors and telephones disconnected until the very minute when the report is issued. Each member of the board prepares his own individual and independent estimate for each crop and State. Then all are com. pared, discussed, and explained, and hnal figures adopted. Then tho fun begins. In an outer room is a group of newspaper men, each with a telephone nearby, already connected with his oflice. Shortly before tho moment appointed for release of the crop report copies of it aro placed face downwards on a table, and each man gets his hand on "one, like a runner set on his mark. They point/ for their telephones like dogs indicating game. A signal is given by a high official of the Department, and the men mako for the telephones as if their lives depended upon it-ns. indeed, their livelihoods mav. Then all over the country the news is posted, printed, read almost with bated breath by some, but passed over by the score of the latest ball ganio by others whom it nevertheless affects most acutely. * . Even before the reporters began their lively sprint, before tho board was locked in it's isolated room, tho Department was watching over tho inviolability of its own crop news. There are ten crop specialists for the different leading crops, and about 175,000 voluntary crop reporters. Some, of these are farmers or farm-observers while others are buyers and handlers of grain and live stock. The returns for each class of reporter are tabulated and averaged separately for a check on the rest. So much for i'nclusivencss and accuracy. To ensure secrecy even the tabulators and computers who make u\) the totals do not know to which Stato they pertain. And the final telegraphic reports and comments of the field agents are kept locked up in the office of the Secretary of Agriculture until thev aro turned over to the Crop Reporting Board in its guarded room. , „ Members of the beard and all otlier members of the Department concerned with crop estimating are under heavy penalties not to speculate in any products of Hie soil, not to give out advance information, and not knowingly to compile or is-uo false information.

The Archbishop of Dnblm has become n patron of the Actors' Church Union. \ patent has been taken out in America, for the manufacture of "pearls" from the crystalline lenses of the eyes of fishes and sea animals, which arc said to be almost indistinguishable from genuine ncnrß