During the year, potato farmers invested unprecedented amounts of capital in equipment in order to gain and maintain the assurance of high production. Since the war, due to wartime stimulation of production, there has been an abundance of potatoes and the potato surplus has been somewhat of a headache to the USDA officials administering the potato price support program.

Our country is very fortunate in having enjoyed a large production of this universally used food in the past years of general shortages. We should glory in the fact that we have a surplus of a cheap and nutrious food that is a staple of the American diet.

We would all be very pleased if the supply side of the meat, milk, butter, wheat, and grain picture were as favorable as the potato side of the picture. If that were so, we would not hear the public complaining about the high cost of food and we would be able to export millions of more pounds of food to feed the starving peoples of other lands without robbing our own people of essential foods and fibers.

There are those who claim that potato prices cannot be supported because it is a perishable crop. We wish to present a different viewpoint. From the experience gained in supporting the price of potatoes during the past two seasons, we are convinced that the price of potatoes can be supported without excessive cost to the Government. The main defect in the 1946 and 1947 potato price support programs was that there was no provision written into the Steagall amendment providing for the disposition of the potato surplus.

This should be easily accomplished if you would amend your bill and direct the Department of Agriculture to enter into contracts with private industry to provide potato-processing plants in some of the important potato sections, such as Long Island, New Jersey, Maine, and Idaho.

Senator THYE. You must not omit the Red River Valley. We just cannot let you bypass us and go clear out west.

Mr. WELLS. You have a great potato country out there.

Senator THYE. Yes, we have excellent potato country out in the Red River Valley and even South Dakota has excellent potato acreage.

Mr. WELLS. These potato meal, starch, and flour plants would be there, ready to use, when there were surplus potatoes. The low grades could be converted into starch, flour, livestock feed, and other useful byproducts. The byproducts so produced would in a large measure pay the cost of removing any potato surplus. In fact, we have a new processing plant in operation and three firms interested in starting plants.

This shows what private capital is willing to do, if Government will only do its part.

We note in your bill that marketing agreements are the chief means of taking care of fruit, vegetable, and potato growers. We wish to state emphatically that while we approve of marketing agreements, we consider them hopelessly inadequate to take care of the needs of a crop which is grown on over 3,000,000 farms, scattered throughout the 48 States. It is physically impossible to have enough marketing agreements to cover all these farms. Potato farmers are willing to do their part but don't ask us to do the impossible.

Senator YOUNG. Would you mind an interruption there?

Mr. WELLS. No.

Senator YOUNG. Do you not think it would be desirable for potato growers to enter into agreements to restrict their acreage at times? Mr. WELLS. If they were designated as a basic crop, I think that would come automatically under the regulation.

Senator YOUNG. The Red River Valley last year, and the area between there and Wisconsin, had such an arrangement and we deferred acreage to a considerable extent which helped other areas. It seems to me when we have a surplus problem that may be a necessary part of the program.

Mr. WELLS. Long Island took a larger cut voluntarily than any other section of the country.

Senator YOUNG. There has been a tremendous amount of criticism of the potato program and I think you are just as interested as the rest of us in trying to eliminate as much of that as we can.

It seems to me our support program in the past has not operated quite the way it should.

For instance, No. 1 potatoes were bought and held in storage. Later it was claimed that these best potatoes were spoiled so that the consumer actually had to buy the lower grades when he should have had the No. 1 grades.

Mr. WELLS. That is, of course, the object of these processing plants; the first ones they would take off would be the low-grade and cheap potatoes and remove them from the market.

Senator YOUNG. There is a promising field for the use of potato surpluses, particularly in feeds. We have found out there that hogs can be fattened very well on potatoes. In fact, you can dump them right on the ground and they will dehydrate themselves out in the weather and hogs will come along afterwards and eat those for several months and do very well.

Mr. WELLS. I have done the same thing, with cattle, too. They are a very good food for every creature.

Senator YOUNG. That is all I had to ask, Mr. Wells.

Mr. WELLS. This long-range bill, we feel, should be designed to promote a balanced economy within this vital part of our food production, and to insure that the grower in producing a good supply of potatoes does not go broke, and to insure the consumer that there will be an adequate supply at a reasonable price.

If acreage control is a necessary part of potato price support, we are willing to do our part. As Mr. S. R. Smith, head of the Potato Price Support Section of the Department of Agriculture can verify, Long Island offered to make a greater cut in potato acreage if other sections would follow suit. We, potato growers in Suffolk County, stand ready and willing to cooperate on any fair and just acreagecontrol program, which will treat all sections alike.

I would like to close with a plea that potato farmers be accorded the same treatment that rice, peanut, and tobacco growers are given in your bill. Rice farms are less than 1 percent of the farms in the United States; less than 10 percent of the Nation's farms grow peanuts, and less than 10 percent of the farms grow tobacco.

In contrast, nearly 50 percent of the United States farms grow potatoes. We are not saying that rice, peanut, and tobacco growers should not have price support, but we are asking that potato growers be given the same consideration in your bill as the growers of the seven so-called basic crops.

Several representative farm organizations of Long Island gave your bill careful consideration and voted that we state here that it was their unanimous opinion that potatoes should be made a basic commodity. Therefore, we potato growers, representing over 2,000 Long Island farmers, ask that your bill be amended to read on lines 22 and 23 of section 302 (a):

Cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco, rice, peanuts, potatoes, and wool

I wish to close in thanking your committee for the time and the courtesies that you have extended to me and my associates.

The CHAIRMAN. That is a very interesting statement. Thank you. Mr. WELLS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Our last witness is Mr. Frank Hussey, president of the Maine Potato Growers, Inc., Presque Isle, Maine.

STATEMENT OF FRANK W. HUSSEY, PRESIDENT, MAINE POTATO GROWERS, INC., PRESQUE ISLE, MAINE

Mr. HUSSEY. I came as a potato grower in Maine. I happen to be the president of our cooperative marketing organization.

The CHAIRMAN. What is the leading agricultural product of Maine? Mr. HUSSEY. Potatoes.

Senator AIKEN. They raise quite a lot of them up there.

Senator THYE. Mr. Hussey, do you ever find Red River Valley potatoes on your consumers' market?

Mr. HUSSEY. We do not, in Maine.

Senator THYE. You do not, in Maine?

Mr. HUSSEY. No.

Potatoes from your State and your section and ours meet somewhere in Ohio, perhaps in the western part of Pennsylvania.

Senator THYE. It has always been of interest to me to see how utterly we have failed in the marketing of potatoes in that we have permitted the culls normally to be peddled to our consumers locally, which places a discrimination against our own local potatoes, and the nice packs, the U. S. No. 1's that have been packed in a pleasantappearing package, go clear across the country to the table of a consumer in another State, with many, many dollars of transportation and handling costs involved.

We in Minnesota are constantly being invaded so far as our consumers' market is concerned, by Maine, Idaho, and oftentimes California potatoes, which is just throwing a cost upon the producer that is unwarranted and unnecessary. Because we are careless about the type of potato we permit to be marketed locally, the consumer feels that he has to get an imported potato before he really can get a good potato.

Senator AIKEN. I think you have laid yourself wide open, Senator Thye, because Mr. Hussey will probably tell you that Maine does not raise any potato culls.

Or, if they do, they are down in Hancock County, not up in Aroostock.

Mr. HUSSEY. I wish I could say that but I am afraid we have our share of the culls.

Senator AIKEN. That is the first time I have ever heard it.

Mr. HUSSEY. I hate to knock the props out from under you on that, but I do think that is a real problem, Senator Thye.

Senator THYE. Senator Young touched on the problem when he said the culls should be taken off and in some manner processed and that the U. S. No. 1 potatoes should be the potatoes that go to the consumer. As the program has been administered, I personally have seen some excellent No. I potatoes spread on the field, deteriorated, and lost to the consumer, and then in the early fall the culls have been peddled all over our consumer centers. It just puts a "black eye" so to speak on the locally grown potato.

Mr. HUSSEY. Senator, in my testimony here I will try to approach that problem and discuss it with you further.

Senator THYE. I brought that point up because you are president of your association and I think you people, the associations in general, can take action to bring about a correction. It cannot be done by the consumer and it cannot be done by a Senate committee.

It can be done by the organizations themselves.

Mr. HUSSEY. That is right. Your committee and Congress can assist the potato growers in making possible some correction of that. We individually cannot do it alone. We can assist, and we are going to suggest that through the medium of marketing agreements and other self-help approaches, that we try to meet that problem because it is a real one.

The industry has been groping for some time to find a way of meeting that problem along with some others.

I should like to add further that I am a member of the executive committee of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, representing potatoes on that executive committee. My own livelihood comes entirely from a farm as a potato producer.

The CHAIRMAN. What percent of the production of the country would you say is under cooperative control?

Mr. HUSSEY. I cannot give you a good answer to that, Sentaor Capper. In our own State our own marketing organization markets about 20 percent, slightly over 20 percent of the potatoes shipped in interstate commerce from the State of Maine. We are the largest potato cooperative in the country.

The CHAIRMAN. You have found the system of cooperatives a sound practical program?

Mr. HUSSEY. Yes; we have. We believe it is one of the best ways of helping ourselves rather than asking you in Washington to do something for us. We feel that is one method we can use to improve the industry, as Senator Thye has brought out.

Irish potatoes are grown in every State and on a large number of farms and in urban gardens. It is an important feed item in the diet of almost every person in our country.

The commercial crop is concentrated in relatively small areas. These areas are scattered, however, across the country from east to west and north to south. There is attached a dot map prepared by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics of the United States Department of Agriculture which shows the more important areas of production.

The commercial growers are highly specialized and most of them are dependent to a large extent and many are almost entirely dependent upon potatoes for their livelihood. Our area in Aroostook County is the largest potato-producing county in the United States. Potatoes are virtually the only cash crop grown.

Many other crops have been grown on trial, but we generally end with potatoes alone and some cover crop.

Potato prices are highly sensitive to supply conditions. Naturally the prosperity of consumers is an encouragement, but even so, only a few too many potatoes result in distressingly low prices. 1927 and 1928 were generally considered as prosperous years, and business was generally healthy in both years. In 1927 the average United States farm price for potatoes was $1.02 per bushel for a 370,000,000-bushel crop. Production in 1928 increased 15 percent, and prices decreased almost 50 percent, or to 53 cents per bushel.

I will have prepared and sent you a map prepared by the Bureau of Economics of the Department of Agriculture which will show the more important areas of production.

During the 5-year period of 1935-39 potato growers produced an average crop of 356,000,000 bushels on an average of 3,000,000 acres of land. For this size crops we averaged 70 cents per bushel. During the war years about 400 to 425 million bushels of potatoes were needed. All during the war years we were able to provide an adequate supply of potatoes except for about 3 months late in the spring of 1943.

Production during the so-called Steagall period averaged 426,000,000 bushels on 2,687,000 acres. This was an increase of 70,000,000 bushels on 300,000 fewer acres. During this period the price per bushel doubled over the prewar average and the farm value increased from 246 to 595 million dollars.

The potato industry has been severely criticized for the cost of this program. The cost was nominal all during the war years. 1946 was the only really disastrous year. In 1946 growers reduced acreage to the lowest level in about 40 years, but almost ideal growing conditions all over the country, better cultural practices and availability of improved insecticides resulted in an all-time record yield. The program cost a net of about $88,000,000. If it had not been for this program, I do not believe that growers would have received 50 cents a bushel for that crop. I know that many thousands of acres in my State would not have been harvested on account of low prices. Since potatoes are such a high cash cost-of-production crop, many growers would have been forced to mortgage their farm in order to continue in potato production even on a reduced acreage.

In response to an acreage-goal program established by United States Department of Agriculture, growers reduced planted acreage to 2,147,000 acres in 1947. This is about 30 percent below the prewar acreage.

I would just like to interpolate here a bit. The criticism of the potato program has been that due to the Government's program, the acreage has been increased, resulting in the great surplus that we had in 1946.

That isn't true. We had a surplus, but it was due to improved practices, improved insecticides.

The acreage has been reduced, and last year we had the lowest acreage in those 40 years.

Senator THYE. You had a 25 percent increase in the average yield

in 1946?

Mr. HUSSEY. Yes; but the acreage declined.

Senator THYE. The acreage declined, but the actual yield per acre, over the entire Nation, on a practical basis, was up about 25 percent.