Chairman BARDEN. Here is the thing that so many people do not understand. In the operation of even a small farm he must have cash crops if he stays in business. He cannot just raise corn and potatoes, and so forth, for his family. He must have cash crops to provide the money in the fall of the year to carry on.

Mr. RIGGLE. And pay his taxes.

Chairman BARDEN. He must buy crates. And the crate and basket business is a tremendous industry. He must pay what those crates cost. The prices of those crates and baskets, and so forth, have gone up tremendously, as you know. They pay almost as much for a strawberry crate now as they used to be satisfied to get for a crate of berries. They buy their clothing and they buy their fertilizer. That is highcost production. All of their fertilizer is high-cost production. They must buy lumber for repairs. They must buy every kind of a gadget almost you can think of. They must have household equipment. They must have stoves. They must have cooking utensils, and all of those things.

At the same time those things are going up his commodity is going down.

He must compete with the price of labor. He cannot sit down and pay much less for labor than the surrounding territory is paying. The mortgage situation is getting bad. If you will remember before the depression, what was it that caved in first? It was the farmers. Mr. RIGGLE. That is right.

Chairman BARDEN. The foreclosures on mortgages, the courthouse doors were literally plastered with them. It bothers me greatly to see the tremendous increase in farm mortgages now being written. The trend now is not to give a mortgage for a thousand dollars this year and pay it off in the fall and borrow again in the spring. He borrows a thousand dollars now, and if he can pay $750 he renews the $250 and borrows another thousand, and in that way it is building up. And, of course, his interest costs, the more he has to borrow the less he has to offer as security, the higher priced interest he has to pay. Is that not correct?

Mr. RIGGLE. That is right.

Chairman BARDEN. So that is a bad situation for the country because the 25 to 30 million agricultural people are tremendous buyers. Mr. RIGGLE. And consumers.

Chairman BARDEN. They are consumers. They are tremendous buyers on the market.

I do not know what the answer can be. You can take tobacco. You know tobacco has been selling for about the same thing for about the last 4 or 5 or 10 years; has it not?

Mr. RIGGLE. That is right.

Chairman BARDEN. Cigarettes have gone from 10 cents to 25 cents a package. And tobacco is staying the same.

And most small farms have a few beef cattle on them, and a few hogs. Beef cattle have fallen from about 32 or 33 cents down now to about 16 or 17 or 18 cents a pound. For choice you may get 20. Steaks are the same price. And the farmer is absorbing that letdown. The price of beef is certainly high enough in the retail market; is it not?

Mr. RIGGLE. Yes, indeed.

Chairman BARDEN. And that baffles the farmer. And if you will go through a farming area now you will see literally millions of acres of small farms that are growing up in weeds with no one living in the house. Those people have gone to town. They will be the first in the breadline, the first unemployed. And then, as you say, you have your social problems.

Now, I do not think either the failure to increase the minimum wage or an increase within reason is going to solve that problem. I must agree with you to some extent that it has increased. It will tend to aggravate the problem that is there.

But somebody, for the general good of the American people, probably is called upon to make some sacrifice.

But there is something deeper and more fundamental involved in this thing that the farmer is meeting now than wage legislation. I don't know what it is. I simply cannot understand.

I come from an area that has a tremendous heavy agricultural population. They cannot understand it. They cannot understand why they pay more for their fertilizer, they pay more for their trucks, they pay more for their clothes, they pay more for everything in the world that they use, and get less for what they sell, less for their beans, less for their beef, less for their pork, and so forth.

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Chairman, I want to call your attention to one: thing that you left out, and that is the hazard of weather. For instance, in my State of Kansas they are going to raise less wheat this year than they have for the past 16 years.

Chairman BARDEN. Well, as to the hazards of the weather and the droughts, my father when he was farming never figured on more than 2 good crops out of 3 years. And he thought he was pretty good if he got that.

Now I wish you could have seen my area the other day when I drove through, to see the farms with corn and tobacco. Tobacco, for instance, is an expensive crop because it takes from 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of $40 fertilizer or $35 fertilizer to go under that, together with the labor. And this hail-storm had come through and it was just a horrible sight. Of course, it is too late for him to replant.

They all have to meet those hazards more than the man that is employed by the hour who works in a cotton mill or works in something else.

But the farmer is terribly troubled. They will catch their breath and think they are fixing to pull out, and the first thing they know something happens somewhere that depresses their prices.

I just have not found anybody yet who could justify a drop of almost 50 percent in the price of beef on the hoof. I don't know anybody who can explain that.

One member of this committee said yesterday he had a herd of black Angus. He said, "I am going to sell them because I can't afford to lose money that way."

Well, he is in the fortunate position that he has another source of income.

But what is the poor devil going to do that does not have another source of income? There is not but one thing for him to do, and that is to do like the butterflies and go to town and hover around the bright lights. That is the only thing I can see for him to do.

But the disturbing thing is the real backbone of agriculture and the real strength of rural people has been the small farmers, what we regard as small farmers, family farmers. And now it has gotten to the point that about the only ones that can get along are the big ones. And they are having their troubles.

Mr. RIGGLE. The amount of acreage necessary to support machinery is the dominating factor at the present time. And that is brought about because of this labor situation.

And I want, of course, to remind you that the squeeze is a two-way thing. You not only have a squeeze downward in the loss of farm income, but we have got this squeeze upward from the bottom at the same time in the increased costs.

This minimum-wage thing, to our thinking, is just a part of a general pattern.

Chairman BARDEN. It is not the whole thing.

Mr. RIGGLE. It is a part of a general pattern. But it is an important part because the Government is involved in it.

Chairman BARDEN. Do you know of any farmer that would not be tickled to death if he could afford to pay $1.50 an hour?

Mr. RIGGLE. As a matter of fact, during wartime when farmers could afford to, the wages of agricultural workers went up faster than any other group.

Chairman BARDEN. They would love to pay it if they had the money. Mr. RIGGLE. That is right.

Chairman BARDEN. Instead of that, they are hanging on by their teeth.

And talking about child labor, you go by the average farm down there now and you will see, as I saw the other day, a little kid driving a tractor. He could not reach the pedals from the seat. And when he got to the end of the row he jumped off the seat and worked the pedals with his feet, and turned it around and went back. The little fellow was doing a good job. He didn't look like he was over 12 years old. He was doing a good job.

Mr. RIGGLE. That is right.

Chairman BARDEN. But those kids are taking a lot of the burden right now of the labor that that farmer cannot hire. Is that not correct?

Mr. RIGGLE. That is right.

Chairman BARDEN. Mr. Elliott?

Mr. ELLIOTT. I would just like to call the gentleman's attention to page 4 of his statement in which he says, in the fourth paragraph:

There are many of these older and unskilled workers who do not want to compete on a full-time basis for jobs, and if they cannot get part-time work at less than minimum wages because of their low productivity they would be totally unemployed, and in many cases on relief.

Now, Mr. Riggle, what I would like to say to you is that it seems to me that very soon, with our increasing longevity in this country, that we are going to have to write in some exemptions or make some provisions and I don't know just how it is going to be done to allow older people to continue to work when they want to do so. And most of them want to do so.

Mr. RIGGLE. That is correct.

Mr. ELLIOTT. We have got, to my way of thinking, one of the most pathetic things about our modern industrial life in the fact that we

have said to men and women that at the age of not more than 65 you have got to stop work and get completely out of the stream of production and get off in a corner somewhere and wait until your time comes to die.

And I think that this civilization of ours has got to do a lot toward the solution of that problem.

As I say, I don't know-you didn't make any suggestion as to how it could be absorbed here except maybe by the inference that you intended to leave here. But I think you hit upon a very important point and one that the country has got to consider and has got to evolve some solution to.

Chairman BARDEN. Will the gentleman yield right there?

Mr. ELLIOTT. Yes.

Chairman BARDEN. I have mentioned this before, but it has recently been brought to my attention very sharply. Bad things are happening to people who have retired from civil service or retired on railroad retirement. The country has, and industry has made great advancement in retiring people. But what we have done and I don't know the answer is that the cost of living has gone up. Where they were once secure they are very insecure now.

Just the other day a gentleman, a nice old fellow who retired on his railroad retirement, had an illness in his family. His wife was in very bad shape. He simply could not get along. He has gone back in with a little satchel arrangement, going around fixing locks and putting in windowpanes and things of that kind.

Some way we have taken that security away from that man.
And there are literally millions of them.

Every penny's inflation we add we cut that much off of that fellow. I have already been receiving petitions from postal employees and from railroad folks and others to increase their retirement, and the civil-service men, to increase their retirement because of inflation.

Mr. ELLIOTT. Mr. Chairman, the point I wanted to emphasize in addition to that one I mentioned is the fact that this older person under our laws, or most of the laws that we have that I know anything about, has to compete in full scale against the man who is 20 years old or 30 years old. In other words, unless he can produce at the same quantity and rate that the younger fellow does, our system tends to lop him off. Your man had to get a little satchel and a couple of screwdrivers to go around and put in windowpanes and so on because there was no place left for him to compete in his age group where he would be in competition only with those of his general scale. Chairman BARDEN. That is right; he could not keep up with them. And this gentleman is talking about an industry. You will hardly find a farm where you will not find 1 or 2 old couples that have been around and maybe lived on a farm. They are kind of privileged characters.

I know when I was on the farm what Henry and Handy said went on that farm.

Mr. RIGGLE. They are advisers.

Chairman BARDEN. Well, they worked when they felt like it. And they did part-time work.

Mr. RIGGLE. They had a lot to do with management perhaps.

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Chairman BARDEN. But if they were put on a straight hourly wage, they could not keep up. They just could not keep up, and that is all

there is to it.

So this thing is not as simple as some would think.

Mr. Landrum?

Mr. LANDRUM. No questions.

Chairman BARDEN. Mr. Metcalf?
Mr. METCALF. No questions.
Chairman BARDEN. Mr. Bowler?
Mr. BOWLER. No questions.
Chairman BARDEN. General?
Mr. SMITH. No questions.
Chairman BARDEN. Mr. Gwinn?
Mr. GWINN. No questions.
Chairman BARDEN. Mr. Coon?

Mr. Coon. No questions.

Chairman BARDEN. Mr. Frelinghuysen?

Mr. FRELINGHUYSEN. No questions.

Chairman BARDEN. Thank you very much, Mr. Riggle.

Mr. RIGGLE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman BARDEN. Miss Borchardt?

It so happens that I have had the pleasure of meeting you, but will you identify yourself for the reporter, please.

STATEMENT OF SELMA BORCHARDT, WASHINGTON REPRESENTATIVE, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

Miss BORCHARDT. I am Selma Borchardt, Washington representative of the American Federation of Teachers.

Mr. Chairman, I ask permission, please, to make a very brief oral statement, and to submit a fuller statement for the record.

Chairman BARDEN. Yes, ma'am.

Miss BORCHARDT. Thank you.

(The information referred to will be available for reference when furnished.)

The teachers' interest in appearing before this committee is the child. We as teachers, of course, are State employees, and naturally would not come under this law. But we are pleading for the child and for his home.

There have been, over a period of 30 years, studies made which show that the IQ is altered anywhere from 5 to 18 points by improved economic conditions. We think there is a very tragic loss to America, to our national stability in having that loss to the American child and to our Nation.

Originally, when the studies were made by Dr. George Stoddard when he was at the University of Iowa, people thought, well, the improved economy generally will be reflected. And it has been.

But a study just completed at the University of Pittsburgh by Dr. W. W. Brown, who is the director of research in York, Pa., schools, has shown exactly the same findings as the Stoddard study showed 30 years ago.

So, as a matter of basic economy, we appeal for a family income which will give our country a better return on its richest and most precious investment, our children.