National Security and the Farm
SOUND agricultural policy has far more to do with maintaining national security than nine out of ten city people realize. All philosophers and statesmen who have ever concerned themselves with the long-time welfare of a nation have placed foremost in their thinking the soil and the people who live on it. If this solid foundation is not kept continually in repair, any superstructure, however glorious it may appear, must inevitably crumble. More than any administration in the recent past, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt has been aware of this problem, largely because the President himself has vivid first-hand knowledge of the soil, the things which grow on it, and the people who work it. The visions of the older Roosevelt with regard to soil conservation and country life have been a guide to action by the present Roosevelt.
There are a number of outstanding objectives in a sound agricultural policy: —
(1) Soil conservation;
(2)More uniform supplies and prices of farm products from year to year to Like care of variability in the weather;
(3)Sufficient stability of income to farmers so that they can buy from the cities their fair share of the good things of life, but without the development of a speculative land boom;
(4)Greater stability of tenure, so that the same farm families can live in the same community year after year and thus build up better churches, better schools, and better coöperatives;
(5)Better diets and better training for farm children, recognizing that one half of the farm children move to town and that one hundred years hence two thirds of the people in the United States will be descended from those who to-day are living on farms.
Soil Conservation
We have been terribly slow in developing an effective soil-conservation policy in the United States. As long as we were a debtor nation with frontiers to the west, we overploughed our arable land, overgrazed our pasture land, and overcut our forest land, endeavoring by this vast exploitation to pay the interest on the money which had been lent by the capitalists in the cities of eastern United States and western Europe. No one had any concern about building a stable soil fertility in the United States. Everyone was busy skimming cream. The fertile top soil was skimmed off fifty million acres and sent into the rivers and oceans; another fifty million acres were eroded almost to the point of ruination; and still another one hundred million acres have been seriously damaged.
It is not customarily appreciated in the United States that, in every one hundred acres of our crop land, we expose to the weather two and one-half times as many acres in row crops as is the case in Europe. Corn and cotton are the two outstanding sinners in this country. Our heaviest rains come during May, June, and July, when corn and cotton land lies most loose and open for the rains to carry it away. Western Europe has a great advantage over the United States when it comes to the problem of maintaining stable soil fertility century after century. She puts only about 40 per cent as much of her crop land into erosion-provoking row crops as we do, and her summer rains are far less torrential in character.
In eastern United States, winter wheat on land which is only moderately rolling is far better than corn, from the standpoint of preventing erosion. But in the Great Plains area there are many soil types on which wheat leads to wind erosion of the most destructive nature. The wind picks up the finer particles of soil and leaves the sand behind.
Overgrazing also plays its part in bringing on wind destruction in the Dust Bowl. Already wind erosion has ruined four million acres and is active over an area three times as large as the State of New York. To meet the Dust Bowl problem, the Department of Agriculture has recently begun a coördinated, carefully integrated attack to eliminate as soon as possible the overgrazing and overploughing which to-day are so rapidly cutting the physical base out from under the farms and towns of the Great Plains area.
In the year 1936, the AAA carried on a vast soil-conservation programme on 68 per cent of all the crop land of the United States. Thirty million acres of soil-depleting crops were diverted to soil-conserving crops or practices. Special soil-conserving practices were carried out on fifty-three million acres. New seedings of legumes and other soilconserving crops were made on thirtyfour million acres. Seven million acres were planted to green manure crops. Limestone, phosphate, or other fertilizers were spread on two million acres.
This programme cost the government more than $400,000,000. Some people criticized the programme, saying that the government paid farmers to do what the best farmers had been doing right along anyway. It was said that some of the best farmers resented receiving checks for doing that which they claimed they would have done anyway. The criticism of the soil-conservation work as encouraged by the government is somewhat similar to the criticisms which were heard of the public school system when it was first started. ‘Why should public education be furnished for the children of rich people as well as for the children of poor people? Haven’t the rich people been educating their children right along anyway?’ And so it is with our soilconservation programme. It is available to good and poor farmers alike.
For the first time we are taking hold of the problem with sufficient vigor to stop the waste. For a generation the colleges, the experiment stations, the farm papers, and the Department of Agriculture have been preaching soil conservation, but four out of five farmers paid no attention, simply because they could not afford to do so. They had to pay interest on their debts and either rent or taxes on their land. Therefore they went ahead year after year overploughing, overgrazing, sending their land into the sea or whirling into the air, and producing ghost farms and ghost towns. Last year the government did as much toward making the farmers of the nation actively soil-conscious as was done by all the preaching and printers’ ink of the previous twenty years. If we had not suffered in 1936 from one of the worst droughts in the past one hundred years, our soil-conservation programme would have been even more successful.
An interesting feature of the soil-conservation programme as we are now conducting it is that, from an international point of view, it is no longer necessary for this nation to send the product of fifty million acres of land overseas in order to pay interest on the debt which we owe to Europe. Now that we are no longer a pioneer debtor nation, but, on the contrary, have become a creditor nation with a very serious soil problem, with at least thirty-five million acres of crop land which should never have been ploughed, yet trying to produce exportable crops, it would seem definitely the part of wisdom for the sake of both the nation and the family of nations for us to proceed resolutely on the path toward making those long-time internal readjustments which long-time national security requires.
Stability of Supplies and Prices of Farm Products
During the past eight, years there has been an ever-increasing interest in stabilizing supplies and prices of farm products. This interest was enormously increased by the events of the years 1932 and 1934. In 1932 wheat and cotton carry-overs were nearly three times the normal, and prices were so low as to bring ruin to farmers and those city people who depended on farmers. The superabundance of farm products increased the number of ragged and hungry city people. In 1934 we had one of the most serious droughts in the history of our nation and the shortest wheat crop in thirty-eight years. The drought was so serious that early in June of that year I suggested the idea of the Ever Normal Granary, designed to stabilize in a practical way supplies and prices for the benefit of both farmers and consumers. The Ever Normal Granary proposal is as old as Joseph and has been tried in China in one form or another for two thousand years. Grain speculators do not like the idea and will put out a vast amount of propaganda designed to prove that it is impractical. Business men who perform useful functions in the processing or distribution of farm products like the idea of increasing stability of supplies and prices. When farm products are two or three times as high one year as they are two or three years later, business men are exposed to disastrous inventory losses.
The weather has been unusually variable during the past eight years, and no one in a position of governmental responsibility for agriculture can avoid pointing out to consumers the desirability of a mechanism which will avoid shortage if there are several years of drought. The farmer and the government owe a duty to consumers to see that they are fed, no matter how severe the drought. But this duty carries with it a reciprocal obligation on the part of the government and the consumers to the farmer to see that his prices do not go to ruinously low levels if there are several years of good weather. The corn farmers of the Middle West saw a practical demonstration of the Ever Normal Granary when, in the fall of 1933, the government lent money on 250,000,000 bushels of corn which was held over into the drought year of 1934. This action benefited corn farmers by holding corn prices up in the spring of 1934, and livestock farmers by holding corn prices down during the late summer of 1934.
All of the great farm organizations and many of the smaller ones are on record in favor of the principles of the Ever Normal Granary. The President has repeatedly indicated his belief in the plan. When it came to drafting a bill, however, the farm organizations found many difficulties. They insisted that any legislation should assure the farmer parity income. They were afraid that, after sufficient supplies had been stored to protect the consumers, farm-product prices would go down to a point which would leave the average farmer with less income, in proportion to that, of city people, than he had before the war. When the farmers presented their bill to Congress, it appeared that it might cost the government a very large sum of money, especially if there were several years of favorable weather. It was asked whether the Treasury would write a blank check for the farmers. Some workable compromise is certain to be found.
But it is fundamental that any compromise should assure such stability in supplies and prices of farm products as would on the one hand give consumers an abundant supply of food and fibre no matter how severe the drought, and would on the other hand maintain the income of farmers even though several years of favorable weather came in succession. The Commodity Credit Corporation could furnish the money to carry supplies from the good years to the poor years even as it did with corn in 1933 and 1934. To avoid losses in case there are several years of good weather, it is essential, of course, that definite power be available to divert land from soil-depleting to soil-building crops. If the granary is full to overflowing, there is no point in farmers wasting their land and their labor in producing for a market which no longer exists. When the granaries are overflowing, there is, of course, the question whether embarrassment to the government on the loans already made should better be avoided by compulsory control of farm production or by voluntary compliance in return for government money as under the old AAA programmes.
In so far as government money is used, it is obvious that a definite limit must be set. This limit, however, might not be high enough to give the farmers that parity of income which they seek. In such case, it would seem that any money available would have to be divided among the farmers producing the crops involved according to their interests. In other words, if the total amount of money available were sufficient to cover only one half the difference between current income and parity income, then the cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco, and rice farmers would share pro rata.
It seems essential that any Ever Normal Granary bill of this sort should include not more than the five crops mentioned, because they are the leading crops which directly or indirectly are on the foreign market in years of ordinary weather. They are the crops the supply of which fluctuates more violently from year to year as a result of weather. The first four are the key crops in our national economy. If corn supplies and prices are stabilized from year to year, livestock and dairy products will also be largely stabilized in price from year to year.
The principle of the Ever Normal Granary can be, and is being, applied to dairy products, fruits, and vegetables by means of the marketing agreements and surplus-removal programmes of the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation. In the case of perishables, storage from year to year is not practical. It is practical, however, to keep producers of perishables from being ruined in times of excess product ion. Millions of pounds of products can be purchased when prices are ruinously low and distributed to the poor people of the nation through relief agencies. The Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation has in this way distributed during the past three years over $200,000,000 worth of agricultural products free of charge to the relief agencies. By keeping prices from going too low, the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation has maintained in business thousands of dairy, fruit., and vegetable farmers who might otherwise have been ruined. Extreme fluctuations in price have been prevented. The operations of this corporation have very definitely been of benefit both to producers of dairy products, fruits, and vegetables on the one hand and to consumers on the other.
Stability of Farm Income
From the standpoint of the general welfare, farmers are entitled to that share in the national income which over a period of years has best promoted stability in the national income. In the fifty years before the war, agriculture’s contribution to the national income was about 60 per cent as large as its contribution to the nation’s man power. For example, in 1880, when farmers comprised 45 per cent of the working population, agriculture received about 28 per cent of the national income. In 1910, when farm workers comprised 31 per cent of the working population, agriculture’s share of the national income amounted to 18 per cent. On this basis we might say that to-day, when farmers account for over 21 per cent of the total working population, agriculture’s share of the national income should amount to about 13 per cent. Actually, agriculture’s share last year was about 10.3 per cent. Had the farm portion been up to its historic share of the national income, or 13 per cent, the gross income of agriculture would have been eleven billion instead of only nine billion dollars.
I wish to take sharp issue with those who would promote policies tending to lower the farmers’ per capita share of the national income. A reduced relative per capita income for the farmer might conceivably be brought about in case industry and labor should effect controls in the towns and cities of such a nature as to end migration of surplus farm population from the land. An increase in farm population of the United States would mean smaller and poorer farms and a reduced income per farm. It would also mean that the efficiency of average farmers would go down to a point which would reduce the farmers’ per capita share in the national income. The same thing would also happen if farmers of the United States continued to produce an excess of commodities for a market which has been curtailed by the fact that we are now a creditor nation with a high-tariff policy.
Certain farm leaders believe that agriculture last year should have received an income twice as great as it actually got. They feel that the year 1919 was the only year in which agriculture received a fair share in the national income. From the standpoint of abstract justice, they may perhaps be right; but, believing in the doctrine of ‘gradualism,’ I am almost as fearful of their point of view as of the view of those city men who preach doctrines that tend to give the farmers a smaller and smaller share of the national income. The reason I fear the doctrine of these extreme farm leaders is that my memory goes back to the land boom of 1919 and 1920 and the misery of hundreds of thousands of farm families which followed thereafter. I want to see the farmers’ per capita share in the national income gradually increase, but I should feel that a great disaster had overtaken agriculture if the increase were of such a nature as to produce a 1920 land boom. It is right and proper that farm land values should reflect farm income. The precise point of the argument, therefore, seems to be, ‘What is the farmers’ relative share per capita in the national income which can be maintained year after year without reaction ? ’
The high 1919 income was full of terrible menace because it was based on a European market which was sure to disappear. It distorted the judgment of the farmers as to the nature of the future. If they had used the profits of that income to buy government bonds or build up their soil fertility, there might have been no disaster. But unfortunately all too many farmers used the high profits of 1919 to buy fake stocks and to bid up land values against each other.
It is important for both farmers and laboring men to realize the exceedingly close relationship which exists between total farm income and labor income. On a yearly basis, farm income and labor income go up and down with almost perfect sympathy. This is true particularly for the farm products consumed chiefly in the domestic markets, such as livestock products and fruits and vegetables. On a monthly basis, it often happens that the payrolls of labor will lead for a few months and then the income of agriculture will lead for a few months. The income of cattle and dairy farmers depends very largely on factory payrolls and labor income.
On the other hand, a large part of city labor depends on the income farmers get from the products that are on the international market. If the income of cotton, tobacco, wheat, and hog farmers goes up, they buy more machinery and the payrolls of labor in machinery factories go up. This labor then buys more meat, poultry, dairy, and vegetable products. We may say, therefore, that instability in the export branches of agriculture means instability in much of our economic activity, and that this instability is eventually communicated by the payrolls of labor to those branches of agriculture which are on the domestic market.
Government has responsibility for stability of farm income because of the way in which tariff policies, monetary policies, and international policies affect the market for our exportable farm crops. If governmental policies along these broad lines bring damage to farmers, it may be necessary for the government to take direct action in bringing about agricultural adjustment designed to promote stability of farm income. We have taken such direct action during the past four years.
Stability of Farm Tenure
The average farm family in the United States remains on the same farm for only five or six years. Many tenant farmers remain on the same farm for only one or two years. Nearly one half of the farmers of the United States are now tenants. Nearly one half of the farmers who own the farms they operate are so burdened with interest and taxes, or are farming such small and such poor farms, that they are very little better off than tenants. In all fairness, it should be said also that many of the tenants are related to the landlord and are better off than many owners. But after all the allowances are made both pro and con, the net situation is great instability of farm tenure in the United States. Both owners and tenants move around too much for the good of the land. It is difficult to build up a stable soil fertility unless a family believes it is going to stay on the same land year after year. For the same reason it is difficult to build a stable school, church, coöperative, or other community institution.
Last summer the President appointed a Tenancy Commission, of which I was Chairman. A report was made, and the House Committee on Agriculture held hearings; a tenancy programme just now has been enacted into law.
I hope the government does not put very much money into a tenancy programme unless it is prepared to conduct also an educational programme which will result in an improvement in the managing ability of the tenants and an increased likelihood of their staying on the same land year after year. It would be a serious mistake for the government to develop a tenancy policy which would foster a speculative land boom or which would in effect again grant unrestricted freedom of exploitation, as was the case under the old homestead policy.
The Resettlement Administration during the past two years has lent more than one hundred million dollars to tenants in the United States on a basis which has enabled it to check up on and improve farm practices among the tenants. The methods used have been a sort of combination of those used by the smalltown country banker in the old days and the methods used by the county agents in recent times. I am convinced that something of this sort is necessary and that it will not do merely to turn a tenant loose with a land title and a government mortgage. If this problem is handled in a superficial manner, the result will be a political drive several years hence to compel the government to forgive the debts which the tenants owe. I am certain that we must have a system which will cause the tenants to have a high sense of obligation toward the government for its help. The land-purchase part of the programme should be selfliquidating, although the interest rates may justifiably be low.
Food and Training for Farm Children
In view of the fact that nearly one half of the farm children eventually come to the town or the city, towns and cities have a very real interest in the way in which such a large segment of their future population gets started in life. The largest farm families are in those sections of the country where the diet and the schools are poor. These children do not get enough milk, oranges, tomatoes, and green vegetables. In recent years this has been somewhat changed. But even yet in the southeastern United States there are hundreds of thousands of children who do not get in their diets enough calcium and vitamins A, B, and C. In the poorer parts of the United States, the rural children fall far short of full-time attendance, and the teachers under whom they study are paid only forty to fifty dollars a month. In 1934 the average salary of supervisors, principals, and teachers in rural schools was less than half of that in urban schools, and in some of the Southern states the average yearly salary for one teacher, rural white schools, was less than three hundred dollars. The average annual cost of schooling a child in the rural sections of these states is only a fourth of what it is in some of the Northern states. Schools are conducted by teachers who themselves should be schooled. The blind are leading the blind. The 50 per cent of the farm children who are going to stay on the land are not properly trained for developing efficient agriculture; and the others, who will move to town, are not properly trained for efficient functioning there.
We may well raise the question whether or not the cities in these poorer farm states might furnish part of the cost of educating farm children who are later to move to town. The Federal Government is furnishing part of the cost of educating these farm children through the Smith-Hughes vocational agricultural work in the high schools and through the 4-H Clubs. Eventually it may be wise for the Federal Government to go much further in this direction.
In conclusion, it seems to me that both farmers and city people should be interested in an agricultural policy which will serve the general welfare by promoting stability of the soil, stability and improvement in the products which come from the soil, stability of farm income, stability of farm tenure, and stability in the economic condition of the people who move from the soil to town. The days of careless exploitation have come to an end. The people in the cities cannot pursue policies indefinitely that tend to suck the lifeblood out of the soil and the people on the soil. Such policies would definitely bring the end of the United States as a nation.
I believe it is possible for the city people of the United States, during the next twenty-five years, to have the maximum of prosperity by planning with farmers to bring about an economy of gradually increasing balanced abundance. To bring this to pass may require somewhat higher Federal expenditures than before 1930, but I believe that if we do have such expenditures, supported by adequate taxes, the net income in the hands of the average business man after he has paid his income tax will be greater over a period of years than over a period without such expenditures. It is necessary, of course, that Federal expenditures be for purposes definitely increasing the general welfare, especially for conserving our soil fertility and other natural resources, for leveling out the business cycle, and for bringing about a more stable purchasing power and a somewhat more even distribution of the national income among all our people.