GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 979 



Mr. Pace. If you enjoy from the hands of yom- Government the 

 protection and assm*ance of a fair price for your commodity, you in 

 turn are under the obligation to limit yom* production within reason- 

 able bounds to save your Government from any unreasonable cost in 

 the operation of the program. I do not believe any farm program 

 will long sm'vive that does not contain that principle. 



Mr. CooLEY. Nor will one long survive who only undertakes to 

 control a part of the crop. You have to control the entire crop, or 

 you cannot have a successfid program. 



Mr. Bryant. Which means marketing quotas, in your thinking? 



Mr. CooLEY. That is right, and penalties on top of that. 



Mr. Bryant. We would like to throw out this thought, that the 

 industry recognizes the responsibility. We have recommended a 

 year ago a program that has not yet started to operate. How do we 

 know that that is not going to work? 



Mr. CooLEY. You mean for 1949? 



Mr. Bryant. Your lower support. 



Mr. CooLEY. You do not have any machinery for enforcing controls. 



Mr. Pace. One of your w^itnesses just testified it is not worth it to 

 26 percent of his producers. 



Mr. Bryant. I am not sure of this, but I think you will find that for 

 the country as a whole we are not over on our acreage, on our goals. 



Mr. CooLEY. You might not be over on your acreage but even 

 in the recent past where you have restricted your acreage you have 

 so tremendously increased the per-acre yield that your controls 

 have been ineffective. Mr. Pace and I are talking about the market- 

 ing end of the matter. We could let the growers share fairly in 

 the market. If there is anything left over we would keep it out. 



Mr. Case. May I say a word on the cultivation of the potato 

 crop. It was only a year ago that potatoes were $8 a hundred. That 

 is a tremendous penalty on the consumer. We have no carry-over 

 or safeguard. To try to set an acreage and guarantee to the house- 

 wife that she will have plenty of potatoes is impossible, as you men 

 appreciate. 



I like your approach to marketing controls, but in so doing we will 

 have to have some assurance if you expect farmers to continue to 

 produce sufficiently, gains over production. I believe you gentlemen 

 are willing to grant that if the potato growers can assure you that in 

 case of a surplus some restrictions will be undertaken. The use of so- 

 called compensatory payments, in our judgment, is entirely a method 

 of penalizing a nongrower. 



Mr. CooLEY. It is true it penalizes many by withliolding the 

 compensatory payment, but we have to think about the Federal 

 Treasury. You know this penalty imposed on the Federal Treasury 

 by the potato program now in existence has been tremendous and the 

 people are not going to stand for it any longer. 



Mr. Case. Combined with those payments would be the Secretary's 

 own determination of how many acres of potatoes we should plant. 

 I would like to refer to the fact that for the past two years the potato 

 industry has not planteil the acreage recommended by the Secretary, 

 nationally. The crops have been good but they have been due to a 

 large extent to very favorable climatic conditions that may change 

 this year. 



