300 GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 



The Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I do not know that you need to 

 apologize to anybody at this time. Mr. Granger has the floor and 

 Mr. Poage has ceased to talk. 



Mr. Granger. I yield to Mr. Andresen. 



Mr. Andresen. I am very sony that politics had to creep into 

 this from the majority's side. Wliile we are sugar-coating let us 

 color it yellow so it looks like butter. 



Mr. Secretary, what I wanted to inquire about was your statement 

 that during the OPA days when you paid a subsidy on dairy products 

 to get production, that was a consumer subsidy. I agree with you. 

 But is your plan not exactly like that one? You are going to pay the 

 farmers so they can get a decent standard of income and you are going 

 to let the commodities sink down to their supply-and-demand level. 

 I cannot see any difference between what they did under the OPA 

 days and your proposal. Wherein does it differ? 



Secretary Brannan. Mr. Andresen, let me respectfully say to 

 you that the approach which we ai-e recommending is a price-support 

 approach to begin with. In the statement which I presented yester- 

 day I pointed out that you could support the price of milk at a given 

 level, as well as milk products, whenever there was substantial volume 

 by the production payment route, much moi-e efficiently, if I may 

 say so, and with much less expense to the Government and to the 

 benefit of the producers than you could with the authorizations we 

 have today. 



Mr. Andresen. Let us get back to what you said, that your pro- 

 gram was different from what we had under the OPA days. There 

 we paid the farmer to get production except on butter which was 

 virtually put out of business because the OPA put a higher subsidy 

 on fluid milk and cheese and some other commodities and the people 

 did not put their milk into butter and the consumers had the benefit 

 of it. But 1 do not see any difference in your program here. 



Secretary Brannan. First of all, we were not supporting prices 

 then. We were operating in an area well above price support. 



Mr. Andresen. But you paid a subsidy to get greater production. 



Secretary Brannan. You did because of reasons which are not now 

 present at all. Federal supplies were extremely short at that time. 

 Therefore, it was extremely expensive for American farmers to produce 

 milk. Yet it was also in the public interest that the price of milk 

 not go up commensurate with the cost of production to the American 

 farmer. Therefore, in the public interest the Government stepped 

 in and made the payment of the diffeience. If, during that period 

 of time, supplies of feeds and fodders for the dairy industry had been 

 in ample supply, there would not have been that kind of a program. 

 No one of those factors is present today. We have adequate supplies 

 of feedstuffs. 



Mr. Andresen. I thought you wanted 150,000,000,000 pounds of 

 milk. 



Secretary Brannan. I want 150,000,000,000 pounds of milk and I 

 think by putting the support level at a reasonable figm-e and stabilizing 

 it there you will begin to get it. 

 . Mr. Andresen. You did that during the OPA days. 



Secretary Brannan. That was a ceiling, not a floor. When you 

 start into that kind of operation you must take a look beyond the day 

 when you get your exact production and your exact demand into 



