The CHAIRMAN. Fine; proceed.

Dr. NICHOLS. I do not know too much about economics or philosophy. I have heard a great deal of it today, which I have enjoyed tremendously. I am not going to give you any of that, if that is all right?

The CHAIRMAN. We have had enough of it.

Dr. NICHOLS. I have with me a complete transcript of the report that was approved of our soil conservation district supervisors on last Thursday, which represents 1,000 farmland operators, a cooperative in the Marion-Cass Soil Conservation District. That is only about 8 miles from the Louisiana line. We are 50 miles from Shreveport, right in north Texas in the Pine Belt.

I am going to read now, if I may, just the conclusion to this whole report. Of course, I might say this: That we have the same problems that everybody else does. We, realizing the problem, realize that agriculture is bankrupt.

In conclusion, we in the Marion-Cass Soil Conservation District believe that the farm problem can be solved only by the restoration of the fertility of the land. The technique for doing this varies in different regions. Specifically in our district this can and must be done by (1) reforestation and good forestry practices on about one-half of our lands; and (2) planting winter cover crops on another 200,000

acres.

In the past our farm leaders in extension have educated our farmers only to exploit the land. They have taught them to use ever-increasing amounts of commercial fertilizer and poison insecticides. With reckless abandon, and no thought for the future, our farmers have been educated to make more bushels per acre regardless of the consequence. This is one of the causes of our surpluses, the very inferior products we produce. As a result, our soils are ruined and our own agriculture is bankrupt.

We need a new type of educational effort, controlled and executed by our own soil conservation district supervisors. We have made a good start in the Marion-Cass Soil Conservation District. We need cooperation from extension services, not attempted domination. That is what they are trying to give us now.

We believe that State and Federal funds should be channeled through the soil conservation district. We believe the local soil conservation district knows best how to handle their own problems. We believe the individual farmer should not be compelled to follow a set of plans devised in the Washington office of the Farm Bureau.

Far too often this type of plan is not only useless but positively detrimental in solving his own local problem. The farm program ought to be decentralized all the way down to the local SCD level.

We need more money for action. Too much of our research has been an effort to further expoit our land. "Federal aid" to help exploit our land more only makes our problem worse. We believe that a big portion of the money now wasted on research should be directed to the Soil Conservation Service, and the soil conservation districts for positive action. We already know how to solve our problems of restoration in the Marion-Cass SCD. We already have an educational program that is getting results.

The CHAIRMAN. Where did you get your information from?
Dr. NICHOLS. Sir?

The CHAIRMAN. Where did you get your information from to carry out these programs that are now in effect?

Dr. NICHOLS. We believe that the answer is the restoration of the fertility of the soil.

The CHAIRMAN. I know that, but where did you get the information from?

Dr. NICHOLS. Where did we learn how to do that?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes. Didn't you learn it from the experiments or other things done by other agencies of Government?

Dr. NICHOLS. My hobby for the last 9 years has been the restoration of the fertility of the soil. I have a thousand-acre farm, as I told you.

The CHAIRMAN. How are you making out with it?

Dr. NICHOLS. Wonderful. I have no surplus of any kind. I have no trouble selling everything I can grow on it because I grow superior quality. People come from Shreveport, Texarkana, Marshall, Tex., to buy my produce, and I get a premium on it.

The CHAIRMAN. What do you produce?

Dr. NICHOLS. All sorts of vegetables on 8 acres under irrigation. The CHAIRMAN. Eight acres? What do you do with the rest of it? Dr. NICHOLS. Grass, pine trees, cattle. I also get a premium for my cattle. We have superior quality. I will go into that in just a minute, if I may.

We believe the new plan sponsored by the Farm Bureau has some good points. But we also believe it has in it a joker that will socialize agriculture. We believe the plan was conceived by the Extension Service and is being presented to Congress and the American public by their camouflaged front boy, the Farm Bureau. There is in it too much compulsion and not enough liberty for the American farmer.

The new "master plan" paraded under the name of a "farm home development program" by Extension, is too socialistic to be accepted by a liberty-loving, God-fearing, American farmer. We do not want to see the county agent become the little dictator on the local level. No such plan as that will ever receive the endorsement of the farm leaders in the Marion-Cass Soil Conservation District. The Farm Bureau is not the spokesman for the farmer in our district.

I would like to bring out one point that came up a while ago. We had one man who said something about the political activities of the county agent. I would like to tell you a little about what they are doing to us in that district.

We have had a very successful program in the last 4 years in that district.

Two years ago we planted 2 million pine seedlings, more than had been planted 10 years before.

The following year we planted 4 million. The program has been so successful, our winter legume program and pine seedling program has been so successful, we have gotten so much cooperation from other people, that this year we started out to raise $35,000 locally, which represented $1 per head of the population, and we were getting along just fine

The CHAIRMAN. How could a farmer live or expect to live if he plants pine seedlings now on his land when he needs it? You are a doctor, you say?

Dr. NICHOLS. Yes, sir; that is right.

The CHAIRMAN. You do not depend on a thousand acres, do you? Dr. NICHOLS. No.

The CHAIRMAN. You have got a nice practice.

Dr. NICHOLS. Everybody up there is sick, Senator; I get along just fine.

The CHAIRMAN. I understand that. But now suppose you tell us what you would do for the farmers.

Dr. NICHOLS. The farmers.

The CHAIRMAN. You would advocate that to a farmer?
Dr. NICHOLS. All right.

The CHAIRMAN. How would he live? He would have to wait how many years, 15 years, to get returns from that pine seedling?

Dr. NICHOLS. Well, here is the situation we have now. 94 percent of the farmers in our district have to depend upon off-the-farm income to eat. That is the situation they are in now. They are not getting anything from their 250,000 acres as it is there.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, now, your solution, Doctor, may be a creditable thing for a place where you can grow pines. But you take all of these drylands of Texas here, where you have a lot of trouble to make anything grow, I guess, much less pine, what do you do in that situation?

Dr. NICHOLS. Well, that is exactly the situation why I think that the thing ought to be on a local level. You see, the answer to the problem is local. You cannot just have one big plan that fits everybody. That is why I think it ought to be decentralized to the local soil conservation district. They know the answers to the problem in each district. We know exactly what to do.

We have 250,000 acres of land that is so badly eroded, worn out, that it is uneconomical to do anything else with it except to put it back in pine seedlings. It would not be worth it to put it backThe CHAIRMAN. Is that peculiar to Cass County?

Dr. NICHOLS. That is naturally a Pine Belt there, as you know, and that was there, what it was in the beginning, and the people who now have their pine tree farms are getting along better than anybody else. The CHAIRMAN. Are they farmers or are they just rural dwellers? Dr. NICHOLS. They are farmers, tree farmers.

The CHAIRMAN. Tree farmers; people with a little money, I guess? Dr. NICHOLS. No.

The CHAIRMAN. To set aside?

Dr. NICHOLS. No. Even a small farmer now, that type of land, we

are

The CHAIRMAN. You mean tree farming in addition to his farming operation?

Dr. NICHOLS. Yes, sir; that is right. But that type of land he has put into pine trees, it does not take too long; in 15 years he can start getting something back out of it.

Let me give you a little bit of the political activities of the county agent, if I may. Is it all right?

The CHAIRMAN. I do not want to go into that. We are trying to keep this above politics and on a nonpartisan basis, and if it was something that would cure the program I would say, "Good," but if you have any ideas to give us as to how to solve this problem I would rather hear that than any political activity of any county agent. Dr. NICHOLS. All right, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Proceed.

Dr. NICHOLS. Let me say-this is just a little bit of a review of what I have heard today-No. 1, that our farm problem is acute simply because of our surpluses.

Our cup runneth over, and it spilleth on us.

What has caused the surplus? When a patient comes in to me sick, I try to find out what causes his trouble.

What has caused the surplus, if there is a surplus? Once or twice today you have suggested, Senator, that we do not have as much of a surplus as some think we have.

We do not have a surplus of quality material of both food and fiber. I believe the folks in California with their cotton do not have any trouble getting a price for it. People who have good quality-out at Hereford, the Deaf Smith County wheat farmers, there are some of them out there that grow a very superior quality of wheat. We buy

some.

I am also into the flour and grinding business. We have a food store where we buy the Deaf Smith County wheat and grind it fresh. It is superior quality. We have to pay a premium to get it.

What is the cause of the surplus? Well, it is because the whole philosophy of our agricultural leaders has been more bushels per acre, exploitation.

We have literally raped the soil and, Senator, it is immoral to rape the soil.

This has resulted in a bankrupt poor soil. There are no more rich black lands in Texas, regardless of what you may hear about it. We just drove through it today coming over here.

To keep up production, millions have been spent on research to find a way to increase production from poor soil.

New varieties which, in many instances, have no resistance to disease have been found.

The farmer has been taught to use more and more commercial fertilizer, and commercial fertilizers does not make land rich. On the contrary, it makes the land poorer than before. It simply drives out the remaining fertility and leaves a piece of dead, hard concrete, and that is what most of our area is, and the end result of chemical farming is always disease, first in the land itself, then in the plant, then in the animal and finally in us and in our children.

The farmer found he had to buy more and more poison insecticides, then medicine in ever-increasing quantities, both for his animals and himself and his family.

The cost of production in our chemicalized agriculture has become so high that the farmer can no longer make a profit.

Down at our hospital when we have noticed the rise in all of our services and our expenses kept coming up, in order to keep our income up, we went to work to see how we could hold down expenses. I think that is another thing this committee should think about. think that is another thing all farmers should consider, how can you hold down expenses.

I

At the present time, it is so expensive to grow a crop-I am chairman of the board, and these farmers come in to the bank, and they want to borrow money to buy fertilizer and poison, and if they would pay enough for what they spend on fertilizer for their crop, on poison and fertilizer, they get practically nothing.

The only people making a legitimate profit in American agriculture are the people who make fertilizers, poisons, and medicine.

What is the answer? It is simple. Only the restoration of the fertility of the soil will solve our problem. This can be done much more quickly than many of our leaders realize. The technique varies in different localities.

In the Marion-Cass Soil Conservation District we put on limestone, rock with phosphate, and land vetch and crimson clover. This restores the life to the soil.

The soil microorganisms are the key to a fertile soil. They are the chefs that feed the plants. They are the doctors that produce the antibiotics for a healthy plant.

On my farm I have not used a chemical of any sort in 7 years. On a 300-acre pasture I have added 2 inches of topsoil in the last 6 years. We have restored the fertility.

You can restore the fertility in less time than that. I fooled around the first year or two.

The answer to the whole problem is the restoration of the fertility of the soil. We have got to cut expenses and make our land rich, and we have got to grow a quality product. When we do that, we will not have any trouble with all these surpluses.

Frankly, I think we ought to take a lot of acres out, but I do not think it ought to be compulsion. It ought to be put into peas and crimson clover. That is what we have where I live.

I think the Government ought to pay a part of it. I think you and I, as individuals, have a tremendous responsibility to agriculture. I think all bankers, lawyers, doctors, everybody, including the State, local, and Federal Government owe such a responsibility.

Ordinarily I am not too much for Federal aid, but I think the Federal Government itself owes a tremendous responsibility to the agriculture of America, and they, too, should do their part.

I think what they should do is to pay the farmer

The CHAIRMAN. That is what we are trying to do through the Extension Service and through the Soil Conservation Service

Dr. NICHOLS. Well, in my opinion

The CHAIRMAN (continuing). And any of the agencies that have been created by Congress.

Dr. NICHOLS. That is right.

In my opinion, Senator, we have been working through the wrong agency. We ought to go through the soil-conservation district, and the Soil Conservation Service, because where I live, the only thing the county agent does is to sell fertilizer and poisonous spray, and that does not restore fertility; that knifes us in the back. They say it is reduplication, and so they try to spike our program; that is what happened.

The CHAIRMAN. You might have the wrong kind of agent in your -county.

Dr. NICHOLS. He did only what his boss told him to do.

The CHAIRMAN. Who was his boss?

Dr. NICHOLS. The district county agent came into our county and he was the one who started it.

The CHAIRMAN. Anything else?

Dr. NICHOLS. No, sir; thank you.