Mr. KING (interposing). This will be a protection to the consumer as well.

Mr. SCHULTE. I do not want to put words in your mouth-heaven forbid-I do not want to do that, but am I to assume that you say now, let him go to the place where he buys the milk and complain there? Mr. KING. That is right.

Mr. SCHULTE. That would ultimately force the distributor down in price? Is that right?

Mr. KING. That is it, surely. Let them complain where they buy the merchandise.

Mr. SCHULTE. The complaint now is that they are paying too much money for their milk.

Mr. KING. I say, let them complain where they buy their merchandise. If you buy a suit of clothes for $60 and you find you paid too much for it, you go back to the man you bought it from. That is where people go to complain. If somebody bought an automobile from me and I overcharged him $10, he comes back and complains to me about it, and I would have to make adjustment or I would not have a customer. But you do what I say, and I think you can stop this spending money down here, and stop running us down here, and stop worrying you fellows. Just do what I say here.

Mr. SCHULTE. Well, I am the easiest fellow in the world to satisfy. All I would ask of you is to just see if we cannot possibly reduce the price of milk to the consumer.

Mr. KING. But the way we are going about it, we are just talking about it. That is all. And it is not going to amount to anything. But appropriate enough money to put inspectors in every plant in Washington city, 24-hour service, and fix the shifts accordingly. I guess it would be 8 hours.

Mr. SCHULTE. Mr. King, with the daily capacity that you have here of 800 gallons, why do you not sell your own milk in the District of Columbia?

Mr. KING. Well, it is just like this: I have got just about all I can do to produce it, and my old head sings now sometimes.

Mr. SANDAGER. How far are you from the District?

Mr. KING. About 22 miles.

Mr. SCHULTE. Do you not think that would be more profitable, if you went into the market yourself, in view of the fact that you have this huge investment?

Mr. KING. Well, you have got to set up a credit department, you have got to set up a distributing department, you have got to set up this, that, and the other. This money has to be collected. These distributors have to collect this money. Everybody does not come in and pay them.

Mr. SCHULTE. You say they do not pay them?

Mr. KING. Everybody does not come in and pay them.

Mr. SCHULTE. Then the distributor has got a day in court too, has he not?

Mr. KING. Sure, he has; absolutely. But just do what I say, and if it does not work out right and does not work out the way it should, come out and I will give you a farm. And that is on the record.

Mr. SCHULTE. I have got a farm, people. Come out and see me. Thank you very much, Mr. King.

Mr. KING. Have you not gone through a lot of foolishness up here that has not amounted to anything?

Mr. SCHULTE. I am going to agree with you on that.

Mr. KING. Let it come out in the papers tomorrow that Schulte has introduced a bill in Congress to appropriate enough money for the District government to put an inspector in every plant, 24-hour service, and find out actually what is going on.

Mr. SCHULTE. All right, Mr. King. Many thanks. Now we will hear Mr. Sabine. Will you give us your full name and your address, Mr. Sabine?

STATEMENT OF LESLIE R. SABINE, MILK PRODUCER,

GATHERSBURG, MD.

Mr. SABINE. My name is Leslie R. Sabine, Gaithersburg, Md., milk producer and shipper.

Mr. SCHULTE. Just go ahead and testify in your own way, Mr. Sabine.

Mr. SABINE. I am just kind of a long-eared farmer, but I will try to do the best I can.

I have been shipping on the Washington market for approximately 25 years, and the farm I own has supplied milk to Washington since Civil War days. In the old days the producers on the market were not organized, and they sold their products as individuals, and believe you me, the job of selling we did was a joke. At that time there were in the city of Washington some 18 or 20 distributors, some large and some small, but they followed the same technique in making their purchases from the farmer. The farmer having milk to sell would come to Washington and interview the various distributors, and finally make a contract to sell his products. The contracts in the main were verbal, and in a few instances they were written, but, as a matter of fact, the written contract was no contract at all, for they were devised by the distributor's legal staff and were so written that they were full of loopholes, and there was a way out any time the distributor wanted it. I might say for your information that in years gone by a great many of those contracts were written by Mr. Darr. I do not mean the eminent Mr. Darr that we know here, but his father. He was a past master at writing those contracts with holes in them. [Laughter.] But at that time the Mr. Darr that you and I are familiar with was wearing short pants and playing marbles. He had not grown that magnificent mustache that he has got now. [Laughter.] But he is still writing contracts, following in his father's footsteps. And he is pretty good at it, too. [Laughter.]

Mr. SCHULTE. You are paying tribute to a very prominent attorney of that particular time? Is that it?

Mr. SABINE. Yes, sir. He was all right at writing contracts.

Mr. SCHULTE. In the parlance of the street, he was "tops" when it came to the law?

Mr. SABINE. He was "tops"; yes, sir. Mr. Darr, we know, is eminent, but his father was preeminent. [Laughter.]

Well, we would come to an agreement as to the price, a flat price for all the milk I produced. I would go along shipping for a month or a few months, and everything was jake. Then some day I would go

to the mail box and here would be a notice from my distributor which would read something like this-it had various variations, but here is a sample: "Upon receipt of this notice please be advised that we cannot handle your milk only 4 days a week. Do not ship Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays until further notice."

Now, what did that mean to me? It simply meant that I had a market for my milk only 4 days a week instead of 7, and the balance of the milk that was held off I had to feed to the hogs, and milk at 3 cents a gallon is high-priced hog feed on any market. And that is right. They will not make the gain. Here I was selling, or supposed to be selling, my entire production to a distributor at a flat price which was plenty low, and when the time came he did not see fit to use it all, and he simply informed me he was not going to take it, and I was in the position of having to take it and like it or else-and there was nothing else.

Now, may I submit that under the present plan of operation I am not subject to the whims and fancies of the distributor. I have an established base that he has to pay me a fixed, definite price for. He cannot get around that.

Mr. SCHULTE. Now, Mr. Sabine, while we are on that question there, I tried to develop this, and I am going to reiterate the statement that I realize it is going to be a hard task, a tough task, but do you not feel that the proper solution would be to eliminate the surplus and pay you strictly a base price for so much milk?

Mr. SABINE. No, Mr. Schulte; because the base, the hardest base that any producer has is based on his production in October, November, and December. Those are 3 months of the year that I guess God appointed that a cow was not to give much milk; and if you let nature follow its course during those 3 months, in any market milk is short. You do not have any trouble with the dealers in those months, even in the old days. They are around courting you. You spoke of presents this morning. They were around with boxes of cigars and pints. [Laughter.]

Mr. SCHULTE. In other words, they accepted them in those days? Mr. SABINE. NO; the dealers gave them to the shippers in the fall months.

Mr. SCHULTE. They bribed you?

Mr. SABINE. Yes, sir. Now, there is many a farmer on the market, but none of them blessed with any surplus cash. They go along in the fall of the year, and they are not producing enough milk to supply this market or any other market. There is not enough here. But you take it when this time of the year comes along, and God put grass on the ground, and that farmer turns his cows out, and they are giving two or three times the amount of milk as they did in the fall, and there is no market for all that milk. So, to make some inducement for a farmer to supply a reasonable amount 12 months in the year, that basis set-up is a mark for him to stick to, and if he falls under it, he has lost that much profit that he should have gotten for base milk, which is the highest-priced milk; and if he slops away over that, that is his own fault. He has not regulated his production right.

Mr. SCHULTE. Mr. Sabine, the point that I am trying to make is this and I am going to reiterate that statement-that this sugges

tion was advanced by a very dear and personal friend of mine who, I feel, knows this milk situation, who has been very sympathetic toward the producer, and he counseled with us the other night, and his suggestion was, and it was a good one though I do not remember it verbatim, but the elimination of the surplus and tell the farmers to increase their base, whatever they are getting now, but eliminate all surplus. Then that would cause the distributor to be in the market for a base, more base. That man was Coleman Gore. know him?

Mr. SABINE. Yes; I know him. [Laughter.]

You

Mr. SCHULTE. Now, you gentlemen that belong to this producers' association, we are going to ask you to be gentlemen during this hearing. He suggested this, and I can readily understand their antagonism toward him, the same as they are antagonistic toward me but, man, I must duck. It rolls off.

Mr. SABINE. Well, I am friendly with the gentleman.

Mr. SCHULTE. Well, you are a gentleman. The point that I am trying to make is this, that eventually it is going to come, because eventually the producer himself is going to see the fallacy of all of this, and that this surplus thing is a brain child of the distributor, placed in there by him, and you fellows eventually, who are sincere with your distributors-and I know you are—will eliminate that surplus and increase your base price. And your milk will not be increased by the consumer; it will be decreased. Now, there is sufficient spread, Mr. Sabine, I feel, between the price of production and the price of distribution to justify a 2-cent cut to the consumer in the District of Columbia, and that should not and must not-that is a serious concern to me-must not come from the producer, because he cannot take it.

Mr. SABINE. As sure as guns are made of iron, if you permit cream to come in here you are going to hand them the very gun they want to shoot us with. Now they are sitting around here-I do not know whether there are any in the room here or not, I do not care if they are-sitting around here now, licking their chops, just wondering if your committee is going to hand them the canary to eat, and if you let cream come in here from the west, that is just what they want, and they will use that to kill us with-and they will do it, and the people of Washington will not benefit a dime. The quotations on those stocks in Wall Street will just rise that much more. That is what will happen. The consumers will not benefit.

And now, speaking of cream, Mr. Schulte, just to digress from this thing a minute, if you let cream come in for fluid consumption, it comes in such concentrated form, 40 percent cream-now, we will say it is the best cream in the world, Indiana cream, the best-to the average layman this 240 cans of bootleg cream that they caught down here, a truckload, does not sound like much, but reduce it back, like the distributors do, by adding skim milk, and that 240 cans of cream becomes approximately 24,000 gallons of milk, and the city of Washington only uses 50,000 gallons of milk a day, roughly speaking, fluid milk. That means that that one truckload of cream was half a day's supply for Washington. So when you get to bringing cream in, it would be possible for them to bring enough in, if you will excuse my language, that they could tell half of us producers on

the market to "go to hell," they did not want our milk. And they would do it, too.

Mr. SCHULTE. Now, we are not so much worried about the health regulations. They are using that as a club to tell these fellows: "If you come in here, we are going to take the health regulations and knock you down with it." But the sum and substance of it is that they do not want the milk in here.

Mr. SABINE. Who does not want it here?

Mr. SCHULTE. You folks do not want western milk coming in here.

Mr. SABINE. Well, it says somewhere, I think it is in the Bible, that self-preservation is the first instinct of man [laughter]-something of that kind. I guess we have all got that in our minds. But on the other hand, Mr. Schulte-this is said in all friendliness—you say you do not want to harm one hair of the heads of us farmers, whether we are bald or not, and if your proposition of letting that cream come in goes through, we will all be baldheaded. [Laughter.] Mr. SCHULTE. Do you know that I am representing a city district, and I voted just now to give you fellows, for the farmers, $400,000,000 more?

Mr. KING. Next year it will be eight.

Mr. SCHULTE. I will even go that far and vote for eight.

Mr. SABINE. So far as I am concerned, I am a farmer out there, and I think that you fellows are giving away too much money, and as far as I am concerned, I do not want any of it, and I am not taking any of it, and you look up the records, and you will see.

Mr. SCHULTE. How much base have you got in the association, Mr. Sabine?

Mr. KING. May I ask a question, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. SCHULTE. Yes, sir; go ahead.

Mr. KING. This $400,000,000 that you just told us is a gift to the farmers, where does that money come from?

Mr. SCHULTE. It comes from the folks in Indiana, Illinois, out of the city districts?

Mr. KING. It comes from the consumer, does it not?

Mr. SCHULTE. Sure it does.

Mr. KING. Well, do not fix it so that we cannot live and keep on baiting us along and letting us think we are getting somewhere. Do what I asked you a minute ago, and that is all you need to do, and the sooner we will stop paying these bills.

Mr. SCHULTE. Mr. King, you are not doing half bad in this world. I will settle for half that.

Mr. SABINE. Now, you wanted to know what my base was?

Mr. SCHULTE. Yes.

Mr. SABINE. I have got a base of 107 gallons a day.

got a 70-cow barn.

Mr. SCHULTE. What are you getting for your milk?

Mr. King testified?

Mr. SABINE. Less.

Mr. SCHULTE. You are getting less?

Mr. SABINE. Yes, sir.

Mr. SCHULTE. How come?

Then I have

The same as

Mr. SABINE. Maybe my milk does not test as good as his. Mine

is Holstein milk. I do not get the price in butterfat.