1140 GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 



May I make one point, Mr. Chairman? It came up in connection 

 with what Mr. Poage said and it also came up again in connection 

 with what Mr. Albert said. You will recall that we did not include 

 wool as one of the priority group commodities because it was not in 

 the category of those commodities which contributed to farm income. 

 Wool is in the draft of the bill which has been introduced on this side. 

 I am not opposing its being in there, but I wanted to point out to you 

 that by moving it into the priority commodity group you did put the 

 price level automatically at 49.8 cents, which is the figure we used here. 



Otherwise, we might have been able to support it at a lesser figure. 

 These costs might have been appreciably different than the estimate 

 I made. 



Mr. Poage. Mr. Secretary, in connection with placing wool in any 

 of these groups, I wonder if we can understand that the hair of the 

 Angora goat is included as a type of wool? 



Mr. Hill. How about the rabbit? 



Mr. Poage. I am talking seriously about mohair right now. 



Mr. Hill. We have Angora rabbits, too. 



Secretary Brannan. Mr. Poage, we have in the Department, since 

 long before I got there, taken a negative position on that. I have not 

 seen any arguments which would justify us in changing that tradition. 



Mr. Poage. You mean we should not support mohair? 



Secretary Brannan. I would say that is correct, sir. 



Mr. Poage. I wonder why we should not support mohair. The 

 goat eats the brush instead of the weeds. Why should that goat hair 

 not be supported? 



Secretary Brannan. That is a long discussion which you have gone 

 over a number of times with everybody in the Department. 



Mr. Poage. I just want to serve notice now that certainly I am not 

 going to support any kind of proposal to support wool anywhere 

 unless we include mohair in the definition of wool because I think it is 

 just as much entitled to support as the wool is. 



Mr. Hill. And that is a short production, too. There is no surplus 

 of that. 



Mr. Pace. Are there any other questions about wool? 



Mr. Hope. I have a question. 



Mr. Pace. Mr. Hope. 



Mr. Hope. Mr. Secretary, has any consideration been given to 

 supporting the price of wool in much the same manner as we support 

 the price of sugar? They are products that are rather comparable 

 with respect to the fact that we import most of our consumption. 

 Both are products that have been protected in the past by the tariff 

 and the tariff protection is practically gone now. We are handling 

 sugar in a very satisfactory way, I think, for the producers. I am 

 wondering if we could not handle wool in much the same way. 



Secretary Brannan. There is some similarity between the sugar 

 operation in a very limited way, and the various additional little 

 provisos that have been added to the wool program from time to time. 

 I cannot say that we used the sugar program as a pattern and tried 

 to operate wool accordingly. 



I do say that we did, in our initial studies, study wool as a commodity 

 and the various means of trying to support it in the most effective way. 

 There is one distinction, however, between wool and sugar. That is 

 that sugar is one plain, simple commodity. It moves almost complete- 



