Dear Joe, I can remember doing that in Australia � in the 1950s. The truck load of wheat was weighed into the silos yard in tons, cwt, qrs, and lbs; the truck was emptied and then reweighed out of the silos yard. After we checked the subtraction, which was no mean feat with all those units, my uncle then carefully calculated the number of pounds in the load, and then divided this by 60 to get the number of bushels (wheat was 60 lb to the bushel). The next to final calculation was to divide the number of bushels by three to get the number of 'bags'; there were three bushels to a bag. Finally we had a number that could be divided by the number of acres to produce our yield in bags per acre.
Of course all of this was done without any calculators, so my uncle had a school exercise book in his truck that was covered in figures. Ah � the good old days � we definitely did the hard yards! Cheers, Pat Naughtin CAMS Geelong, Australia on 2002-09-02 00.52, Joseph B. Reid at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > John Kilopascal wrote in USMA 21997: > >> The real odd thing is that food and other >> commodities is measured in tonnes for the world and export markets, but >> still in bushels in the US. If you check the newspapers for pricing of >> corn, and other vegetables, you will see it is in dollars or cents per >> bushel. It is another of those cases where unit confusion is desired. >> >> John > > > The really odd thing is that volume in bushels was recorded at every > stage from delivery to the grain elevator to loading on the export > boat, but was measured by mass at every stage, and the mass converted > to bushels using a different conversion factor for each grain. I > assume that that absurd practice still goes on in the US grain trade.
