made for me at the Agriculture Department the other day-it will take 50,000,000 or 60,000,000 bushels of soybean production in this country, and that will utilize 3,000,000 acres of land, according to the average production figures at the present time. That 3,000,000 acres of land which we hope to thereby develop into the soybean industry, will come out of the land now used in growing cotton, and now used in growing wheat, and if there is any one thing that the Congress of the United States is attempting to solve at this time, it is our surplus cotton and surplus wheat problem. I am offering you a way to get 3,000,000 acres out of those two surplus crops. Mr. JENKINS. You can grow soybeans nearly everywhere in the United States?

Mr. LOOMIS. Yes; pretty nearly.

Mr. LOZIER. Not in the semiarid regions which now produce large quanties of wheat?

Mr. LOOMIS. I do not know much about that.

Mr. WELCH. Is it not a fact that we are now exporting soybeans? Mr. LOOMIS. Well, I did not know it. I would be surprised. There may be some exports of soybeans.

Mr. LOZIER. We are importing them?

Mr. KNUTSON. From China and Japan.

Mr. LOOMIS. Now, it may be asked very easily why we are not doing this now, and the answer is that it is not possible under our present conditions and agricultural prices to produce these protein meals, and can not do so, unless we have a market for the oil. The protein meals are the by-products of the oil. The oil is the principal product, and you can not market soybean oil in this country at the present time in competition with the other oils that come in here. And yet soybean oil is most versatile, and capable of running through the entire gamut of uses for oil. But we must have a market for the soybean oil in this country. Of course, some one is going to raise the question: You are not going to help your oleomargarine situation; you are still going to have cheap oils in this country to make into oleomargarine.

Now, that is true, but I think we are much better able to take care of our competition between butter and oleomargarine if we can have our feeding situation straightened out, and have these high protein feeds for our use.

Mr. UNDERHILL. How much more would soybean oil cost than cottonseed oil?

Mr. LOOMIS. I can not tell you.

Mr. UNDERHILL. How much less would it cost than coconut oil? Mr. LOOMIS. It will cost more than coconut oil is costing us now. Mr. WELCH. Rotterdam is the world's market for soybeans, is it not?

Mr. LOOMIS. Oh, it is the principal market in which soybeans are bought and distributed for consumption in Europe; yes, sir. Of course, the source is Manchuria and China; Dairen is the principal

source.

Mr. WELCH. My information is that we are exporting our domestic soybeans to that market.

Mr. LOOMIS. I am not familiar enough to answer the question, but I want to make this remark, however, that when coconut oil is selling

at 3.6 in the United States, we can not make soybean oil in the United States, and those people who are producing soybeans here may be seeking some other market.

Mr. UNDERHILL. What can soybeans be produced for?

Mr. LOOMIS. I do not know.

Mr. UNDERHILL. What are they produced for now?

Mr. LOOMIS. I think soybean oil was on an 8, 9, or 10 cent basis when they were beginning to get fairly started in the soybean oil industry. That was the very beginning of it in this country.

Mr. UNDERHILL. How does that compare with your 3.6 cents? Mr. LOOMIS. That would be two and a half times the present price.

Mr. SIMPSON. The soybean industry in Illinois was developed on a contract basis, guaranteeing to the farmer from a dollar to a dollar and a quarter, and since the depression the price has gone down to 20 cents a bushel, and the industry is demoralized.

Mr: KNUTSON. What is the average yield per acre? Mr. SIMPSON. About 14 or 16 bushels per acre. I suspect that these shipments were not necessarily for oil purposes; they may be for seeds.

Mr. UNDERHILL. Well, when the industry was successful, how did the price of the soybean oil compare with the price of cottonseed oil? Mr. SIMPSON. Due to the fact that there was a tariff of 212 cents on each pound, since that went into effect, the price relationship of soybeans has been slightly higher than that of the other industrial oils.

Mr. UNDERHILL. So that it would not displace the cottonseed oil? Mr. LOOMIS. Not at all, but it would affect the price.

Mr. LOZIER. The witness spoke about the increase in production of soybean oil, and said that we would have to face a situation of furnishing vegetable oils for oleomargarine. He said that the dairy industry was better able to meet that competition than some other industries. That is because the other products of these vegetable oils more nearly approach the merit and quality of the original than the oleomargarine approaches the merit and quality of butter. No matter how healthful and sanitary oleomargarine may be, no one has ever been able to put into it the chemical properties or vitamines which butter possesses, and that is why butter can stand a little stiffer competition than some of these other products, because you have never been able to put in oleomargarine the chemical properties and food value which nature has placed in butter.

Mr. LOOMIS. I am very glad to have that statement made. I could not have made it as well myself.

Mr. GRAY. In regard to the soybean situation, it is very interesting to note that the Illinois Agricultural Association, which is the name of the farm bureau unit in Illinois, is very active now in the management of, and was formerly active in the creation of, the soybean association in that State.

Not knowing what the condition is to-day, but relating the information that I secured in December, 1931, may I advise the committee that competition of foreign oils imported into this country, beating down the price, together with the general low level of prices,

had made it so impossible to sell soys in this country that the Illinois Agricultural Association in December was shipping soys by freight to New Orleans, and then by ocean freight to western Europe, and was disposing of them for seed and feed among the peoples of western Europe at a bigger price than they could sell them for in the United States.

Mr. LOZIER. There is no demand now for soybeans in the middle west. I have some that were grown last year. There is simply no market for them. The dealers claim that there will be no market for them until the seeding time comes this spring. This instability as to prices of soybeans tends to discourage planting, and this renders the domestic supply of soybean oil and cake exceedingly uncertain. Mr. KNUTSON. Mr. Chairman, it seems to me to be getting pretty far afield.

Mr. BRUMM. I have been waiting for somebody to say that for an hour.

Mr. KNUTSON. We are neglecting our work, and all this material is available in the agriculture yearbooks issued by the Department of Agriculture. I do not want to be rude or anything, but I do not like to waste my time.

The CHAIRMAN. I think Mr. Loomis will conclude in a short time. Mr. LOOMIS. Yes; I am going to conclude in five minutes.

Mr. LozIER. I suggest to the chairman that the gentleman from Minnesota has taken about as much time as any member of the committee in discussing these matters.

Mr. KNUTSON. But I have tried to make my inquiries pertinent. Mr. LOZIER. And so have your colleagues.

Mr. LOOMIS. I want to say that it has been a matter of very great pleasure to us, in presenting this matter, to have the statement made here, as it was made yesterday, that now we are going to come down and put our cards on the table, and each of us talk about our own interests in this matter. We have been very frank, Mr. Chairman, in placing our cards on the table in this matter. The agricultural interests in the United States have an economic interest in this matter, and we have tried to explain it fully and frankly to the committee. All that we ask in return for having done that, is to have the opponents of this measure come to the committee with equal frankness and put their cards on the table.

Now, we have, as proponents of this legislation, all the farmers' organizations, the general dairy organizations, the cotton oil crushers, the cottonseed farmers, the soybean growers-the peanut growers are not represented, but they have fully joined with us in the past in all these matters.

Now, opposing this proposition, so far as we understand it, are two groups of exporters; principally those concerned with selling cotton fabrics in the Philippine Islands and those concerned with selling certain machines, iron, and steel products in the Philippines; and two groups of importers in this country concerned purely with keeping a commodity on the free list; certain sugar interests; certain users of oil and copra, including the soap people, the lard-compound people, and the oleomargarine people...

Now, I do not need to analyze those industries to show you where we believe that we are intelligently selfish in this matter, meaning selfish for the national interests of the United States.

I might say I wish this were before the Ways and Means Committee instead of here that we were told when we presented this matter to the Ways and Means Committee in the last tariff hearings, that if we put a tariff of 2 cents on coconut oil it would double the price of soap in the United States, and that statement was broadcasted, newspaper editorials reprinted and reproduced it until we had the hospitals and the laundries and everybody else using soap in the United States down on our shoulders because we were going to double the price of soap if we put a tariff of 2 cents on coconut oil. Since that statement was made the price of coconut oil in the United States has been reduced from 9.9 cents average to 4.6 cents average price per pound, and the price of soap in 100-bar lots in Philadelphia, as shown by figures gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has remained identically at $4.80 per 100-bar box. Not 1 cent reduction in the wholesale price of soap has come to the people of the United States through a reduction of almost 50 per cent in the price of coconut oil.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Loomis, I am sure your statements are correct, but does not that apply as well to the price of all farm products in a raw state, as compared with the price of the processed product? Mr. LOOMIS. Absolutely, it does not. The price of butter and the price of butterfat follow each other within 5-day intervals in the United States, up and down, and butter as sold at wholesale to-day, and the price of butterfat, generally speaking, over the United States are down altogether, and if the prices come up they will come up together.

The CHAIRMAN. I had in mind, for instance, raw cotton, where the price of raw cotton has decreased pretty much in the same proportion as you say the price of coconut oil has decreased, and yet the finished product has not had a corresponding decrease.

Mr. LOOMIS. The ladies in my family tell me they are buying wearing apparel cheaper than it has been for a long time.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, but they may not be wearing cotton goods. Mr. LOOMIS. There is just one other item. Some question has been asked about the amendment proposed having to do with the immigration features of the act. We have had a brief time for consultation since yesterday. I do not pose as an expert at all on immigration laws, but I think I am speaking for the group here when I say that, so far as any of us can see now, the amendment proposed, which was read here yesterday, relating to immigration, is satisfactory. It is certainly satisfactory until we give it a lot more careful study than we have at the present time.

The CHAIRMAN. In response to the suggestion about the frankness of those who appear in opposition and the request made of the committee by Mr. Loomis, I want to repeat what I said on the day that we opened these hearings, that it was our purpose to give all parties in favor of this legislation an opportunity to be heard, as well as all parties who are opposed to it.

As to their frankness in the matter, the committee does not become responsible.

Mr. HOLMAN. Mr. Chairman, would you mind if I add one additional item of information on the soap proposition?

The CHAIRMAN. We will be glad to hear you.

Mr. HOLMAN. Supplementing the propaganda that the price of soap would be increased so much per pound if the tax was put on coconut oil, we have learned since the Ways and Means Committee hearing that practically all of the soap used by the commercial laundries and hotels in this country is made of hard fats and not out of soft fats, and does not lather. The great argument as to coconut oil is that it furnishes a lather, but none of these soap makers, if they are conscientious, will tell you that coconut oil is used for anything but the finer grades of soap.

The CHAIRMAN. If there are no further questions, the committee will adjourn until Monday morning at 10 o'clock.

(Thereupon, at 11.57 o'clock a. m., the committee adjourned until Monday, February 1, 1932, at 10 o'clock a. m.)