GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 1171 



commodity, and I do not think they are interchangeable in any 

 way, shape, or form. 



Sir. Granger. Let me ask a question there. Mr. Secretary, lamb 

 would also be in the same categorj^ as beef, would it not? 



Secretary Brannan. It would, sh. And the relationship would 

 even be less, in my opinion. 



Mr. Murray. You only had 4 billion pounds of lamb and 18 

 billion pounds of beef. 



Mr. Granger. But, coming back to this question of prices, when 

 the market broke on hogs and reached their lowest point, lambs went 

 to the highest point they have ever been in history. 



Mr. Murray. And the answer to that is that lambs went much 

 above parity and hogs did not. 



Mr. Granger. It does not make any difference; if your theory 

 works, it would work there. It was a matter of the supply of lambs. 



Mr. Murray. That is right; because they killed them all oft' in 

 the last 6 years and are then talking about spending all of our money 

 on soil-depleting crops. I cannot help it if you killed oft" all of the 

 sheep. I did not kill them oft". The trouble is all these years you 

 killed so many they did not have them to sell. 



If we are going to put into operation this plan you ask for — I do 

 not care if it is only on hogs — the thing that worries me and I think 

 would worry anyone else who has been very close to the livestock 

 industry is I can see where we can start a lot of things that we cannot 

 quit. And if we go to work and if the Agricultm-e Department or the 

 Agricultm-e Committee wants to take the responsibility, without put- 

 ting any marketing responsibility on the farmer at all or the producers 

 of this commodity, and they go on the market and get the price 

 down— and prices must be going down or else you would not ask for 

 these funds to pay the difference — and then we run out of "soap" — 

 and if you have read a Congressman's mail in the last 30 days, 9 out 

 of 10 letters say they do not want to spend money — and if we run out 

 of money and cannot pay the difference, we have the prices down, and 

 I would like someone to tell me how you are ever going to get them 

 back up again. 



Secretary Brannan. I just rely on the law of supply and demand to 

 get them back up. Also, as I have answered here earlier, I have said 

 to you and said to the committee a couple of time that there is a point 

 beyond which production of many of these commodities would become 

 wasteful, at which time the farmers should take some cognizance of their 

 responsibility to avoid waste by controlling then production under the 

 machinery which is now provided for a number of the basic crops. 



Mr. Murray. Livestock products up to this time have not cost 

 Commodity Credit Corporation anything, have they — any losses? 



Secretary Brannan. Except wool. 



Mr. Murray. That is correct — which probably was caused by the 

 fact of our being the only country buying. In other words, I do not 

 think the support program should be buying rancid butter, just because 

 they are buying butter; that there should be some qualifications to 

 support it. 



Now, wheat is selling, according to Senator Thomas, about 20 per- 

 cent below the support price at the present time in Oklahoma, Texas, 

 and the Southwest; hogs are selling at between 20 and 25 percent 



