mittee may consider setting aside all the acreage reserve needed for new farms or only that part needed to supplement the county reserve.

A survey should be conducted by each county committee to determine the reserve required for new cotton farms in the State. This survey should be comprised of two types of cotton farms:

(a) The county committees should be instructed to review column (2) of PMA-532-C to determine the farms on which cotton was produced in 1949 but on which cotton was not planted in any of the years 1946, 1947, or 1948, and for which war-crop or armed-service credits for cotton were not determined for either 1946 or 1947. The county committee should furnish the State committee with (1) the number of such farms in the county, (2) the acreage of cropland on such farms, (3) the 1949 acreage of cotton planted on such farms, and (4) the estimated deductible acreage of other crops or land uses on basis of Cotton Memorandum 63. If there are some such farms in the county for which a Form 532-C was not obtained, the county committee should supplement the above items with an estimate of the planted cotton acreage and the cropland on such farms.

(b) The county committee with the assistance of the community committee should estimate the number, acreage of cropland, the estimated deductible acreage of other crops or land uses on the basis of Cotton Memorandum 63, for other farms in the county on which cotton will be planted in 1950 and for which new farm allotments will be established in 1950 that are not included in (a) above.

The county committee should furnish the State committee with totals of items (a) and (b) above, separately. The State committee, on the basis of information available, should approximate the county percentage factor for apportioning the 1950 county allotment to old cotton farms. Not more than a specified percent (not exceeding 75 percent) of the approximated county factor for old cotton farms should be applied to the sum of the estimated adjusted cropland for farms tabulated under items (a) and (b) in each county. This result will serve as a county maximum requirement for 1950 allotments to new cotton farms. The State total of such county maximum requirements will serve as the State maximum requirements for new farms. The State committee should, on the basis of the State totals of the maximum county requirements for new cotton farms, establish a State reserve, if any, for new cotton farms. The State committee should advise each county committee (a) of the maximum acreage as computed above for new cotton farms for the county, and of that part of such maximum acreage, if any, included in the State committee reserve for new farms, and (b) that the county should establish its reserve for new cotton farms on the basis of the remaining estimated maximum acreage needs.

Mr. WHITTEN. In case a State or county committee in its desire to get along with everybody neglected to exercise its rights and prerogatives under that law and failed to recognize that there were any hardship cases, although there may be many, and such committee merely divided the county acreage across the board, what can the Department do with regard to such a situation?

Mr. TRIGG. Of course, the Department can correct it. As Mr. Schoonover, the representative of the Solicitor's office, pointed out here, the Department could, in a hardship case where a county committee failed to comply with the regulations go in there and simply increase the allocations of that acreage and let it come out of thin air. It would be added on to the total. In other words, the limitation on the allocation of acreage is on the minimum. The Department cannot go below 21 million.

Mr. WHITTEN. I understand it could add to future problems in years to come, and it might weaken your control program, if a local committee could distribute its allotment across the board and thereby entitle many of the producers in the area to additional cotton which they would have a right to.

This would weaken the whole program, but in view of the fact that many State and county committees failed to reserve any acreage to amount to anything, in some instances it may work undue hardships on some producers. In order to get at the proper base or starting

point, I think it is proper for you to aid in such hardship cases in order to get that proper starting point.

Our real problem now is to get a fair and equitable point from which the future years' program may operate.

Mr. TRIGG. Mr. Chairman, we plan on doing that very thing, administratively. If for any reason we find that a county committee or State has not done the job in accordance with the instructions we sent them and ignored hardship cases, we plan to go in, investigate the situation thoroughly, and if they were in error we plan to correct it. It is the only equitable thing we can do. No mistake should be left standing. We should take steps to correct it in the interest of the producers.

Mr. WHITTEN. I am glad to hear you say that. The House passed the new resolution the other day which will relieve a lot of the hardships that are in this present program, but we cannot rely on that entirely because it has to pass the other body.

SIZE OF ECONOMIC FARM UNIT IN THE SOUTH

Mr. HORAN. For those of us who, like myself, do not know too much about the economics of cotton farming I wonder if Mr. Trigg could tell us what the minimum economic farming unit for cotton, for instance, is.

Obviously, any acreage allotment should, in all fairness, not reduce a man below the acreage that he has to have in order to sustain life or provide a livelihood for his family.

I wondered what that was for a one-family unit.

Mr. TRIGG. Mr. Horan, I am not a cotton farmer either, and I would hesitate to say anything in view of the chairman's experience and knowledge of this situation in his own State. But it seems to me it would depend a great deal, regardless of what has taken place in the past or may take place in the future, on conditions of the local area.

Now an economic unit, we will say, in the rich Mississippi Delta, where the production is high, or in one of the irrigated sections of the West, might be entirely different than what the acreage is for an economic unit in some other part of the country where the yield is not so high.

Mr. HORAN. It varies by commodities. The studies in the irrigated fruit areas indicate 39 acres in the early 1930's was considered the most economical, one-family acreage for an apple ranch, for example. It may have been influenced by economic shifts since then.

Studies must exist. I just wondered if we could not have them supplied for the record, some discussion of this and amplification.

I think it would be enlightening to those who are interested in acreage allotments to know what those standards might be. (The information requested is as follows:)

The following table appears in the report, Agricultural Adjustments Toward an Efficient Agriculture in the South, prepared for the use of the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first session. (See enclosed table which constitutes page 36 of that report.) The report was prepared by representatives of the agricultural experiment stations of the Southern States, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and other agencies in 1947. The acreages and livestock numbers of important suggested systems of farming shown in this table by subregions were prepared to indicate efficient farming units assuming no acreage-control programs, use of improved production practices, and

use of modern mechanical equipment. Sizes of efficient farms will vary materially with the physical conditions, the type of farming, the size of family, and other conditioning factors. These suggested systems illustrate efficient combinations of resources for systems of farming that are common in the various subregions.

For most subregions the efficient farms suggested are single-family, one-tractor units requiring additional labor only at peak periods. In the Delta and the fluecured-tobacco regions, however, the units suggested would require two to three additional families. Effective utilization of cotton pickers in the Delta would require a unit of about the size indicated unless suitable arrangement for joint use of cotton pickers could be worked out, Suggested units in the flue-curedtobacco regions provide for efficient use of mechanized equipment on crops other than tobacco.

* * *

*

The report contains the following comments on these farms: "The sizes of farms suggested as efficient units would be substantially larger than most existing farms in nearly all subregions. A large portion of the farms in the South are too small to permit efficient operation. * * Increasing the size of farm leads to greater efficiency in three important ways. It makes practicable the use of motorized equipment, it affords opportunity for a better combination of enterprises, and it makes possible more effective use of family labor and management."

Mr. KRUSE. Mr. Trigg, I am somewhat interested in the mechanics of the marketing-quota and acreage-allotment program.

I understand what the purpose of the program is, but I have had one or two situations come up which raised some questions in my mind. What happens in the situation where an individual is a farmer on a large scale and he does not wish to come in under any of these programs, but he is assigned a particular quota or particular allotment so far as raising the crops are concerned.

He does not like that and wishes to raise more crops. I have had such a situation brought to me, and I was wondering what the situation was in that case. Is he free to proceed on his own, or does he have to comply?

Mr. TRIGG. I would like to answer that in two ways: One of them is taking the example of the crop that is under allotment but not quota. Let us take, for instance, potatoes. It is a good example of a commodity under acreage allotment but not quotas. Present legislation does not provide for marketing quotas except for the basic commodities.

In that case, if a person chooses to overplant his allotment, all that is done is that he is denied price support for all of his production.

He can overplant his allotment 100 percent. He glides right along under the market price. He might sell at a little less than the market price. He gets the benefit by overproduction. There is no penalty for it.

Then the rest of the people who comply, they sell their product to the Government and the market is held up and this man slides along under the market, selling where he pleases.

In the case of the other provision, where you take a crop that is under penalties, under qouta, we will say, such as the six basic commodites, a farmer is given an acreage allotment. As a means of enforcing plantings within allotted acreages, penalties are imposed on the farm marketing excess of cotton, wheat, corn, and rice, and on the sale of tobacco and peanuts produced on the acreage in excess of the farm-acreage allotment.

If he is allowed to market 100 bales of cotton and he has produced 110, there are certain provisions in the law which he must follow to prevent him from marketing that extra 10 bales.

Perhaps Mr. Schoonover can fill in on that, but generally speaking it prevents him from putting that extra 10 bales of cotton on the market.

Mr. SCHOONOVER. If you were talking about rice, corn, or wheat, the farmer can put them in storage and hold them in escrow, so to speak. Of course, he cannot put it on the market. In the case of cotton there are no storage provisions. If he produces 10 bales too much cotton he has to pay the penalty, regardless of whether he keeps it off the

market or not.

Mr. KRUSE. The penalty attaches insofar as the marketing quotas are concerned, and not the acreage allotments?

Mr. SCHOONOVER. That is right.

Mr. KRUSE. I can see where an individual could harm the program unless there be some kind of a penalty.

Mr. TRIGG. Your noncomplier on your nonbasic crops are the ones that really harm the program.

Mr. WHITTEN. That is what is happening in potatoes.