GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 387 



Another thing particularly important to dairy farmers — and we 

 have a great many of them in our organization — is that historically in 

 the flush production j^eriod in the dairy business during the spring 

 and early summer months when the cows give a gi'eat deal of milk, 

 usually the market goes down during that period and as the volume of 

 milk tapers off in the hot dry weather and when the heavy fly season 

 comes later during the year, the market goes up when the farmer has 

 less to sell and it is down when he has most to sell and the average is 

 an average nationally and annually and that is an unhappy situation 

 for him. 



In those instances we hope that the committee will give consideration 

 to that problem. 



Now, we move on to title II of this bill, section 201. You will note 

 some rather wide departures from any suggestions that have been made 

 as to surpluses or reserves. I should like to say, Mr. Chairman, that 

 all of us undoubtedly have participated back over the years in helping 

 to build or to permit to obtain a psychology generally throughout the 

 country to the effect that a so-called surplus of an agricultural crop 

 was not only a calamity to farmers but was a great national disaster. 



I should like to call to the attention of the committee that in 1940 

 and 1941, particularly, we had the largest carry-over of wheat, and I 

 believe the same thing was true of corn, and I believe you gentlemen in 

 the South had a similar problem with cotton in 1941. Everyone was 

 shedding crocodile tears about this gigantic surplus. AVhat would we 

 do with it ? It would cost the farmers and the country a great deal of 

 money. A few" months later came Pearl Harbor. We were immedi- 

 ately able to convert, then, and our terminology was rapidly converted. 

 We talked about reserves of wheat and corn, not surpluses. Our abil- 

 ity to immediately convert those great reserves of wheat, corn, and 

 -cotton into the things needed by our allies without having to wait for 

 another production cycle to try to build up production beyond our 

 minimum domestic needs was a great value to us. 



I have had men high in the military counsel of this country tell me 

 that had it not been for those reserves immediately available it is con- 

 ceivable that the conclusion of World War II might have been post- 

 poned as much as a year and perhaps more, with its cost in money and 

 lives. 



It seems to me that all of us ought to join in building an understand- 

 ing and a national psychology that not surpluses but adequate reserves 

 of storable agricultural commodities are a great national asset and 

 that they can be handled so as not to disadvantage farmers and to be of 

 great value to consumers and as a part of the insurance for which con- 

 sumers, through their capacity as taxpayers, buy when they pay taxes 

 to support an agricultural program. 



We suggest that the Commodity Credit Corporation be directed as 

 early as may be to accumulate storable commodities, all of them that 

 may be stored, in an amount equal to not less than an average year's 

 production of each of those connnodities, not jus-t in the fear that we 

 might have another war sometime, but as just plain horse-sense insur- 

 ance against the belief that we cannot expect, through the years ahead, 

 to have the weatherman, the good Lord, treat us so well on the pro- 

 duction side as He has done year after year for the last 8 or 9 years. 



91215— 49— ser. r, pt. 3 3 



