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Show Floods and Drouth Destroyed Crops on 13 Million Acres Last Year Latest reports from the U. S. department de-partment of agriculture show that growing conditions during the past year were probably a little better than average, despite floods throughout through-out the Mississippi basin in May and June and severe drouth tn Arkansas and the surrounding states during the summer, and in the region extending ex-tending from New Jersey into Virginia. Vir-ginia. Total crop area lost was about 13,500,000 acres, government figures show, nearly 2,800,000 more acres than were lost in 1942. Pastures and most late crops suffered suf-fered from the hot, dry weather during dur-ing July and August although June produced enough dry weather east of the Mississippi to permit farmers in most areas to catch up with late planting and haying. Showers in the corn belt and the eastern half of the cotton belt prevented pre-vented serious damage from the drouth there, and reports show that the warm weather enabled nearly all of the threatened corn and soybean acreage te mature before frost. The dry summer and fall also helped most farmers to complete their gigantic gi-gantic harvesting job. The 1943 harvest totaled about 347,500,000 aeres, exceeding 1942 by nearly 3 per eent or more than 8,000,-000 8,000,-000 acres despite wet weather that prevented planting of some acreage, acre-age, losses from drouth, and flooded acreage that could not be replanted. |