AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FEDERATION 



28l 



cess which that order had had in building terminal marketing agencies. 



Farm Bureau delegates vigorously protested against these arguments 

 and in the end they won out. Farmers' Union delegates, much to their 

 disgust, discovered that when the committee recommended that the local 

 associations join up with a state-wide farm organization, "it meant join- 

 ing the Farm Bureau in their respective states and not the Farmers' Union 

 or Equity." The prevailing sentiment behind the plan of the committee 

 was best summed up by the Iowa leader who said: "Well, the Farm 

 Bureaus are expected to pay all the cost, so why in the deuce shouldn't 

 they control?"' ! Though this sentiment was perhaps valid enough, the 

 fact was that a flare-up was ignited which was to persist throughout the 

 twenties and well into the Federal Farm Board era. 



If the American Farm Bureau Federation originally had placed its 

 chief reliance on cooperative marketing, the evidence is that by 1924 its 

 faith had shifted to surplus-control measures. Surplus controls appear to 

 have first received serious consideration during the summer of 1923, when 

 the Bureau proposed that the farmers withhold two million bushels of 

 wheat from market as an emergency measure. It was hoped that the 

 farmers would make use of the Intermediate Credit and Warehouse Acts 

 passed by the Sixty-seventh Congress. According to this legislation, the 

 Secretary of Agriculture could rule that a farm storehouse or granary 

 could become a bonded warehouse and thus permit the farmer to put his 

 surplus wheat into his own bins, lock up the door, and turn over the keys 

 to a government agent. He would then receive a warehouse receipt on 

 which he could borrow money from the Intermediate Credit Bank. That 

 fall, the American Farm Bureau Federation went on record as being 

 opposed to government price fixing of agricultural commodities, empha- 

 sizing the point that the surplus wheat question was an economic and 

 not a political problem. 



Early in 1924 the executive committee of the American Farm Bureau 

 Federation endorsed the amended McNary-Haugen bill that provided 

 for an export corporation to dispose of the agricultural surpluses. It based 

 its action on the theory that agriculture, the most basic industry in the 

 country, suffered from low prices because of unfair trade practices, from 

 market-sharing agreements among the major nonfarm producers, from 

 58. Nourse and Knapp, The Co-Operative Marketing of Livestoc^, pp. 124-39. 



