a large scale and long span of time. In the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) the government established a nation-wide state granary system, which involved a total of 2.2-3.3 million tonnes of grain, the largest such system in the world. Over 100 million lives were saved by the grain distribution scheme. In the 1850s Taiping Rebellion the granary system was destroyed and never fully restored. Storage of agricultural products for price stabilization has been used in modern times in many countries, including the United States. The term "ever-normal granary" was adopted from a Columbia University dissertation on Confucian economic practice that was read by future US Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace circa 1926, before he came into office. Wallace brought the term into the mainstream of American agropolitical thinking after the 1934 drought. One example of this idea was presented by Benjamin Graham in his book, Storage and Stability, written in 1937 during the Great Depression. Graham suggested that much like years of high agricultural yields, the years of overproduction of commodities in general could be neutralized by storing commodities until periods of underproduction. The idea was in response to overproduction of goods during the depression, as well as the desire to preserve jobs and to stabilize prices. EU intervention storage The creation of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy was the trigger for the creation of modern Europe's large-scale intervention storage. In an attempt to stabilize markets, and set prices across the EU member states, the Common Agricultural Policy allowed the states to place huge reserves of produce into intervention storage in an attempt to flatten the natural supply and demand curves. During the 1980s, especially in Britain, the farming community received large monetary incentives to reduce production of certain crops. The establishment of milk quotas was one mechanism employed to enforce production limits on farmers. A particularly good run of summers during the period 1985–86 saw a large surfeit of produce coming onto the market and the first intervention stores. One such store run by "High Post Grain Silos" leased 18 unused aircraft hangars at the former Bitteswell airfield and filled them with over 250,000 tonnes of feed wheat. The storage solution was simple, the grain was shipped into the hangars directly from the farm, having first passed a testing criterion. The stored grain was cooled by forcing air through the grain stack, a process which temporarily preserved the grain.