GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 69 



Mr. PoAGE. It is bound to be before you next year, within the next 

 planting season. Do I understand that the Department contem- 

 plates that if the production is great enough this year to justify it, 

 in your opinion, you plan on using this power next year to control 

 the total plantmgs on the farms of America? 



Secretary Braxnax. I have no such thought. 



Mr, PoAGE. You only contemplate controUing the production of 

 those crops where the farmers vote acreage controls or marketing 

 controls? 



Secretary Branxax. That probably would be the area. I cer- 

 tainly do not want to say some things here this morning which will 

 preclude us from working out an effective farm program. To that 

 extent, I wish to be very careful in what I say. 



Mr. PoAGE. Do you think you have to have that power, what I 

 may call this newly discovered power? Do you think you have to 

 have that power to effectively operate? 



Secretary Braxxax, Mr. Poage, again the purpose is an effective 

 farm program, one which will justify the expenditures of the amounts 

 of money which the American taxpayer will have to be called upon from 

 time to time to spend. That is the point the chairman made a few 

 moments ago. 



Mr. PoAGE. I thmk the program in the past has justified the ex- 

 penditures, and I assume you agree that it has also. 



Secretary Braxxax. I certainly do, and I want to make it very 

 clear that I think a substantial expenditure of funds in the price sup- 

 port program will always be in the national public interest. 



Mr. Poage. I agree with you. 



Secretary Braxxax. But it may be found desirable in some areas 

 by some device or other — and I am not saying by a penalty practice 

 of some kind or other — to try to induce the farmer not to continue 

 to raise another competitive crop to the one he and his brothers have 

 just voted to get out of, or induce him to get into a soil-conserving 

 type of program looking toward an expanded live-stock industry, 

 for example, or an expanded dairy industry. 



Mr. Poage. With the general decline in farm prices that seems to 

 be on us now, and that is apparently still under way, including 

 dechne in livestock prices, which has just been about as severe as it 

 has been in other prices, will we not rapidly reach a point where if we 

 are going to use this control of the diverted acres as a method of main- 

 taming prices on all commodities we will simply have to require that 

 all diverted acres lie fallow and ultimately take a substantial portion 

 of the American food-producing plant out of operation? 



Secretary Braxx^\x. I do not think it follows. 



Mr. CooLEY. Will the gentleman yield? 



Mr. Poage. Surely. 



Mr. CooLEY. It appears to me that it might naturally follow when 

 you have a surplus of tobacco, a surplus of peanuts, a surplus of cotton, 

 a surplus of wheat, and a surplus of corn. 



Mr. PoAGUE. And a surplus of livestock. 



Mr. Andresex. Oh, no. 



Mr. CooLEY. If you lay down a farm program in my area and say 

 that I cannot grow any of those crops, and I cannot grow anything 

 that competes with any of those crops, then naturally I am going to 

 have idle land vrith nothing that I can turn it to. 



