country than all the rest of the Government agencies combined in the way of guaranteeing a fair price so that we could obtain full production. And I think the farmers would be pretty well satisfied if they knew that they would continue to have this agency, which has rendered such a good service.

Also I desire to say that the farmers of this country, as well as the consumer, appreciate the splendid service Mr. Andersen has rendered on the agricultural appropriations subcommittee. He is always there to look after the interests of the farmers.

Mr. ANDERSEN. Thank you, Mr. Brown. You have been one of the leaders in Congress in the fight.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Andersen.

We will now hear from Mr. Curtis of Nebraska.

We are very happy to have you appear before the committee, Mr. Curtis. You may proceed.

STATEMENT OF HON. CARL T. CURTIS, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE FIRST DISTRICT OF NEBRASKA

Mr. CURTIS. Mr. Chairman, my statement is very brief, and I think it will take less time if I stick to the statement rather than summarize it.

One of the bills to continue the farm support-price program through commodity loans was introduced by me. I appreciate the courtesy extended to me by the committee in inviting me here to appear in behalf of that proposal. My remarks will not be technical in nature. I merely want to state the case for this proposal from the standpoint of the farmers.

The farm support-price program by means of these loans has met with wide approval. I recall the year that the corn loans went into effect. The price of corn was down to a very low figure. As soon as the loans were available, the farmers could secure the loan and hold the corn for a more favorable price. However, the price immediately went up to equal the loan. This type of program particularly fits the section of the country that I represent. Some years we have an excellent corn crop. This may be followed by a year of crop failure. The program not only stabilizes the price but it holds the corn over in the community from the years of plenty to the years of scarcity. The application of this program to wheat is equally successful.

The cost of the program so far as staple products which can be stored is concerned is not great. The grain upon which a loan is made is still there. It has an intrinsic value. With proper administration the support-price program can be carried out at a very low cost.

A program which, if properly administered, brings a fair return for the farmers' corn, wheat, eggs, poultry, dairy products, and other items means everything to the American farmer. He wants not public charity but a fair price in the market price for the fruits of his labor.

From the national standpoint it is imperative that we maintain a high farm income. The minute the farm income goes down, the national income goes down. When the national income goes down, our Federal revenues fall off disastrously. A loss in revenue means deficit financing for the Government, has an adverse effect on our bond market

and on our credit. We cannot knowingly and wittingly permit the national income to go down. The way to keep it up is to assure a high farm income. For every dollar of farm income this Nation will enjoy $7 in national income. Should the farm income fall off any given figure such as $5,000,000,000, there will follow a loss in national income of approximately $35,000,000,000. This would mean a loss in Federal income of upward of $10,000,000,000. The extension of the supportprice program for agriculture is a must.

Thank you, gentlemen.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Curtis.

Are there questions of Mr. Curtis?

(No response.)

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Curtis.

extend and revise your remarks for the record.

Mr. CURTIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You may

The CHAIRMAN. I believe Dr. Talle has a few remarks to make on his bill.

STATEMENT OF HON. HENRY O. TALLE, REPRESENTATIVE FROM THE SECOND DISTRICT OF IOWA

Mr. TALLE. You will note that the time factor in my bill is 4 years. That is the point I probably should explain, although I think I gave the principal reasons for it yesterday in connection with the testimony of the Under Secretary of Agriculture.

I think a longer period than a year or 2 years is very important because a short period does not permit the farmer to plan ahead sufficiently so as to carry on the best agricultural practices.

For instance, in cattle raising, you would need a period of 4 years, in my opinion. I think it is also true that the best agricultural practices carried out by tenant farmers grow out of long-term contractssay, 5 years. The tenant has little interest in building up the soil if he has a 1-year contract. He will probably mine the soil.

But if he has a contract running for 5 years or so, he will expect to retrieve something from agricultural practices which may not yield him the largest income in the first or second year, but which, in the third or fourth may yield substantial advantages.

I do not think I should take any more time, Mr. Chairman. I am certainly for the Commodity Credit Corporation and for the farmprice-support program.

If I were to say anything additional, it would be largely repetitious of what has already been said.

That is all, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. FOLGER. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TALLE. Yes.

Mr. FOLGER. Mr. Talle, you mentioned something which I think is deserving of a great deal of consideration, and which I think is highly important. That is the reality, as I have observed it in my district, that this change of tenants every year or two makes it quite unlikely that you will be able to keep your farm up without proper soil-conservation practices. If the tenant is going to leave after the first year or the second year, you can hardly expect him to be very interested in what may become of that farm in the years to come. So I think it is highly important.

Mr. TALLE. I came upon something exceedingly interesting to me a year ago this month. I saw some beautiful wheat fields in the upper areas of the Nile. As a matter of fact, the farmers were harvesting their wheat in the month of April. They were harvesting the wheat with the hand sickle, the kind we use for cutting weeds along the sidewalks, and they were binding it with straw, as the pioneers used to do in this country. They had no twine. The bundles were carried on camel back to a threshing floor, where an ox was tied to a shaft. He walked around and round on the threshing floor all day, as recorded in the Old Testament account of farming. They tossed the straw aside, and not far away there was some black clay; and there some straw was used for making brick in the Old Testament manner, as a sort of collateral enterprise.

After my return I talked with the Ambassador from Egypt and I commented on the beautiful stand of wheat I saw.

He said:

Yes, it is a good stand of wheat, but there is relatively little nourishment in it. If you compare the wheat grown there with the wheat grown in the United States where you have good soil fertility, one kernel of your wheat is worth several of ours. The Egyptian wheat you saw lacks the food qualities which people should get out of wheat.

I do not want the United States to become that kind of country. I am interested in good farm practices, and in building up our soil, so that when we raise wheat we raise wheat which has nourishment in it, and not semichaff which looks good but does not have the properties necessary to a good livelihood.

Mr. HAYS. Mr. Chairman, I am sorry I did not hear the first part. of Mr. Talle's statement. I asssume that he was speaking of methods which might be pursued to protect the basic soil resources.

Mr. TALLE. That is right. And if the farmer gets a decent price, he will be encouraged to pursue good farming practices. That ties in with my long-term suggestion. In our country, where there are so many tenant farmers, we will get better farming practices if we have assurance of support prices over a longer period of years.

Mr. HAYS. Do you think there is some provision we should write into the law to stimulate those practices? Or were you thinking in terms of price?

Mr. TALLE. Well, I was thinking in terms of both. I think both might very well go into the report.

Mr. HAYS. I agree.

Mr. Chairman, I think we ought to have something to say about that in presenting this bill, because the tendency is to think of it just in terms of a mechanical operation-just the extension of a banking facility. But Mr. Talle has put emphasis on one phase of the problem which I think belongs in the legislation. The recent history of agriculture shows that in fighting the tenancy evils notice should be taken of improving landlord-tenant relations which is as important as the ownership program.

I remember when we were first struggling with that, over in the Department of Agriculture, and there was quite an emphasis on farm ownership. Our agriculture system could not survive if we were going to let this trend toward tenancy go unchecked. We began to think in terms of measures to arrest it, and to get owners where we

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had tenants. But after a while we saw a lot of situations in which a tenancy relationship is desirable even more desirable than ownership.

Then, there came along this other program, which is also wholesome, to provide, instead of the 1-year tenure, a long-term arrangement, a longer lease situation, to provide the practices Mr. Talle has mentioned. So I think the point should be in the report and I certainly endorse everything Dr. Talle said.

Mr. SMITH. Will you yield?

Mr. HAYS. Yes.

Mr. SMITH. I do not quite understand what you mean by a long lease. Do you mean that Congress should pass legislation providing for longer leases?

Mr. HAYS. No. I asked Mr. Talle if he thought some specific provision should be placed in the bill. I am not thinking of any specific legislation, but I am endorsing what I know to be the Department's present policy of encouraging written leases for longer than 1-year periods. As has been brought out, those things make for conservation and good farming practices. A tenant who has a 5-year lease is going to be more concerned about the productiveness of the farm than he would be if he were just interested in getting everything he can out of it in 1 year and then moving on.

This tenancy problem was terrific. We found, for example, in the middle of the agricultural depression, that nearly a million farmers were changing locations every year. The majority of them, I will admit, were in the South, where we had the sharecropper situation. But it is not healthy from the standpoint of the Nation as a whole for 950,000 farmers to change their location in 1 year. The Department is wise in saying, "Let us do everything we can to encourage longer leases." We cannot make owners out of all tenants, of course.

Mr. SMITH. How far is that concept from the forcing of such a situation?

Mr. HAYS. Well, everything that they have done at least everything they have done that I would endorse-has been on a voluntary basis. That is, there has been no effort to force a relationship.

Mr. SMITH. I say, how far removed is it from that point of compulsion? Of course, we admit that there are diseases in our economy. The question is: How are we going to cure them? Are we going to cure them by law, by compulsion, or do some of these things, just as in the case of the human body, have to cure themselves by their own curative processes? There are some things in the human body which you can cure with medicines, but there are some diseases that must cure themselves.

Mr. HAYS. Well, Doctor, I appreciate your position and while this might lead to philosophical speculations, I certainly agree with you, basically, that Government must avoid compulsion. I think however, that Government has a service to render, and I woud go further in rendering such service than you would, perhaps. And I think what the Department is doing to improve landlord-tenant relations is very important. It has a great social significance. I see no escape from consideration of that problem in the pending bill, because this is an aid to a great farm program which is chiefly concerned with price, but if price becomes a fetish, then, we have destroyed certain values in American agriculture which would be hard to recapture.

There is another impression abroad, Doctor, and you have noticed it: That is, that if we have a good price, that condition solves all problems. It does not. It does not solve the tenancy problem. They say that a man who gets a good price for his product can hold his farm and he will not become a tenant. But the figures show that when your price is highest for farm products, your trend toward land tenancy is greatest. In other words, the very thing that we think is good can become an evil from a social standpoint. If you have speculative prices, certainly that is true. But it is our job to stabilize the prices through sound Government policies which do not at the same time destroy these other values.

I think that is substantially what Mr. Talle was saying, and I so thoroughly agree that I hope that when this problem comes up for discussion in the House, he will be prepared to present these phases intelligently.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Brown, do you wish to be heard on this bill? Mr. BROWN. All I wish to say is what has already been wisely said: That all we have to fear is fear itself. There are many contributing factors that make the production of crops uncertain, and I think my bill should be enacted so that we will have some protection for the farmers in the way of fair prices.

Secretary Dodd covered very fully the reasons why this agency should be made permanent and I do not think I can add anything further.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That is all I have to say.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any questions of Mr. Brown?

Mr. GAMBLE. You are in favor of your bill, Congressman Brown? Mr. BROWN. I think everybody is in favor of my bill, but I think they are afraid to go that far. The consumers as well as the farmers, I believe, are in favor of it. The Agriculture Department is in favor of it. And I believe everyone is.

The CHAIRMAN. I might say for the record that this committee has written a great deal of very fine agricultural legislation and much of it has been the result of the constructive thinking which we have enjoyed from Mr. Brown. He always leads the members on these problems and we are very grateful to him and glad to follow him on matters of agriculture.

Mr. HAYS. If I still have the floor I think it would be very unfortunate if we do not place in this report something on the conservation angle. Here we are in this country, extending ourselves to produce the food we need and the food the world needs. And were it not for these conservation practices, we could exhaust ourselves, and have the American farmer carry a burden during this transition period which it would be tragically unjust to impose on him. I feel so strongly about it that I just brought that out, really, to underline what Mr. Talle was saying.

Mr. KUNKEL. Will you yield?

Mr. HAYS. I yield.

Mr. KUNKEL. I was very much interested in what you said about tenancy increasing during a period of high prices.

Mr. HAYS. The figures show that, over a period of years, definitely. Mr. KUNKEL. I have never seen those figures, but I was wondering if there was cause for that in that during a period of high agricultural prices new land is brought into cultivation, and frequently that new