230 GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 



bushels that do not move into the commercial market because they are 

 used as seed potatoes, held back on the farm for planting the next year. 



Mr. Hope. Of course we do not know where the price of potatoes 

 would have gone had it not been for the price support program and 

 if no attempt had been made to keep the price up; they might have 

 gone to a dollar or they might have gone lower with that large over- 

 production, and mider the price support program you would have 

 had to pay out an awful lot of money if you did not have some control 

 over the production. 



Secretary Brannan. That is right. 



Mr. Hope. In either case you will keep on spending a great deal 

 of money, depending upon the amount of control you are able to 

 exercise over production. 



Secretary Brannan. That is right, Mr. Hope, and I want it very 

 clearly understood that if we just check up unlimited production on 

 any specific commodity that sooner or later any program, the present 

 program we have or an}'^ program will break it, and certainly your 

 production payment program would be in serious financial difficulty — 

 there would be just one difference: Under the present program, if 

 you have unlimited produclion the consumer still has to pay a high 

 price and contribute the tax money to pay for the production program, 

 and under the production program, whatever may be consumed, the 

 consumer will be able at least to get more commodities, and get them 

 cheaper. But I say to you that there will have to be some limitation 

 on production on some of these commodities. The Congress has 

 already indicated, by putting authority on the books, and having 

 some of them a long time ago, and your appropriation committee 

 has made an appropriation of $9,000,000 for us to go out and get 

 prepared to put acreage limitations on cotton, corn, and wheat this 

 year — we have been told to get out and be prepared to put them on 

 if and when necessary, and an additional $30,000,000 is proposed 

 next year, and I think it is pretty well accepted across the board 

 that there is going to have to be some limitations. But will you 

 permit me to elaborate on one more aspect of it: If we can begin to 

 get meat into the market places at reasonable prices we are certainly 

 going to have less worry about where your 1.7 billion bushels of corn 

 can be disposed of, because you can get the corn disposed of through 

 hogs, and the only outlet on the market at the present time for hogs 

 when pork is selling at $0.80 or $0.85, as my wife said she paid day 

 before yesterday, and when you can begin to get pork down in price 

 we will begin to expand the consumption of corn, and bring down 

 that production tremendously and that wiJl delay the day when we 

 will have to be asking for acreage limitation and marketing quotas on 

 corn at least. 



Mr. Hope. "When you speak of getting pork on the market at a 

 reasonable price do you mean a price lower than the income support 

 standard? In others words, is a reasonable price for pork to the con- 

 sumer less than the standard at which you are going to support the 

 producer? 



Secretary Brannan. It may be, and it may be because of the in- 

 creased efficiency of production, but with the settlement of production 

 payment methods to take care of that overproduction, then we should 

 be able to take on as a hedge against possible crop failures that might 

 occur in the future, and we could more and more try to produce the 



