Hogs and Hominy 163 



IMPORTATIONS INTO THE U.SA 



1933 



o Hogs 100,000 



o Corn (Ibs.) 1,200,000,000 



50,000 Cattle 250,000 



o Tallow (Ibs.) 200,000,000 



Foreign corn- and hog-raisers and foreign processers were 

 getting rich on the American market, while American packers 

 were paying process taxes to the government to be used to pay 

 farmers not to raise crops. 



The Supreme Court's decision that the extraordinary powers 

 granted to the Secretary of Agriculture under the A.A.A. were 

 illegal, and that this government could not legally prohibit 

 the production of food, was the triumph of those eight mil- 

 lion hogs which never went to market. 



We are still too close to the crisis to judge of the effective- 

 ness of the A.A.A/s program of farm relief. Nobody knows 

 what it has done for the corn belt. 



Farmers are going back to raising corn and hogs, or not 

 raising them, according to their own judgment of the markets 

 for these. From October 1939 to June 1940 the hogs slaugh- 

 tered under Federal inspection numbered 34,332,746. Many 

 farmers are making use of the opportunity the government 

 offers them to put their corn in bond. But all of them are 

 wary of extending their corn acreage. Many are letting fields 

 go back to grass for grazing. 



One result has been the increase in subsistence farms in the 

 eastern states. By applying scientific methods to the cultiva- 

 tion of outworn New England fields, the yield of corn per 

 acre in Connecticut during 1939 was ahead of that of Ohio, 

 and nearly equal to the average yield of an acre of Illinois or 

 Iowa cornland. Too, farmers in the South have gone in for 

 hog-raising. Whereas formerly, 73 percent of the hogs in the 



