Wheat is a crop of Kansas, our economy, our agricultural economy rises and falls on the welfare of wheat. You fellows came from the West. I understand from Oregon here, you may have noted wheat is the last crop grown before you come to sagebrush.

It is the most adaptable crop for arid and semiarid sections. No other crop takes its place. When we attempt to divert acres we get into difficulty because we have no other trump card to play. That isn't true in other sections. Therefore I maintain any legislative action that Congress may take should do this one particular thing and that is safeguard the wheat acreage for the wheat-growing area, which is the arid and semiarid country of the United States.

That includes, of course, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana.

The CHAIRMAN. What about the Northwest, Oregon and Washington?

Mr. YODER. Their wheat problem is a little bit different, although they call their product wheat, it isn't a bread grain.

The CHAIRMAN. They make fine crackers and cakes with it.

Mr. YODER. That is right, but you also make very good things to eat out of corn. We must remember that we farmers and you legislators should recognize that we have two fictitious people, not altogether fictitious people, that help us; weatherman is one and the Secretary of Agriculture is the other.

The CHAIRMAN. He is not fictitious: is he?

Mr. YODER. He is not fictitious but he is a changeable individual. If I am to have the wholehearted and favorable support of either of them, I prefer to have the weatherman because in our economy, as pointed out here this afternoon, production times price minus cost gives us net income. If you don't have production I don't care whether supports are a hundred percent, high, low, or no support. You can't do anything legislative unless you have production. You legislators can help us in only about two fields, and that is disappearance of wheat and that you can in your export opportunities, and in price.

I maintain that one of the neglected disappearance opportunities for wheat has been the opportunity to use it for feed. For twentysome years I have grown pure-bred registered hogs. Wheat was my main grain. I grew wheat for feed or food. I feed 1,500 to 2,000 bushels. If corn would have been strychnine my hogs would never even have had a bellyache.

Senator THYE. Are you still doing it?

Mr. YODER. No, I got out of the hog business.
Senator THYE. When?

Senator SCHOEPPEL. I would like to ask this: You said something about Mr. Benson. Now, I am sure you will agree with me that when former Secretary of Agriculture Anderson, now our colleague in the United States Senate and a member of this Agriculture Committee, and a fine one, and Mr. Brannan were in the Secretary's position, and now Mr. Benson, they operated under the laws that the Congress gave them to operate under. So maybe we had better take a look at the gentlemen up here and in the Senate, and the other 435 in the House, because we gave them the laws under which they operate. Do you agree?

Mr. YODER. I agree with you. You are doing the finger pointing. I am also, I should have mentioned this in the beginning, I am also director of the Kansas Wheat Growers Association. Consequently I am not going to make much testimony. I had it written out but Mr. Patterson this morning covered that.

I will point out what has been wrong with the past program. One of them is the 15-acre maximum provision in the law on wheat which hurt us badly in some areas. That production was usually occurring in our Eastern States and in those States they get yields much higher than ours. So their production was very high even though their acreage was not great.

Another thought is this. Those people used to feed a sizable amount of that wheat they raised, but they don't do it today. They take it all under our support price, all to market, and they have taken home milled feeds and mixed feeds and left the flour. That hurt us.

Of course, along with all that has been a wheat-acreage shift which was pointed out. Although that acreage doesn't sound great it has been augmented by the great amount of fertilizer used in some areas. Senator THYE. Can I ask a question there? Is there fertilizer applied to your wheat acreage in Kansas?

Mr. YODER. Yes; it is, and under some conditions of irrigation it has accomplished a great deal.

Senator THYE. But not on your dry land?

Mr. YODER. NO. It oftentimes is a failure in dry-land operations. Senator THYE. You do not fertilize in your dry-land operations? Mr. YODER. Some do, but it is a risk because it may be a dry year and you lose your fertilizer. Part of your trouble is 3 or 4, really 4 consecutive dry years the weatherman hasn't been our friend at all. That has hurt us.

I said I am strictly for the full parity plan. I think it is wrongly called the two-price system. I would like to explain it briefly. To the farmer he is permitted under the full parity plan, the farmer is not restricted as to where he must sell, for what purpose he must sell, he can sell any time for any price to any person for any use. Now that will permit, gentlemen, the opportunity for a great amount of wheat to be used for feed.

The CHAIRMAN. Suppose you don't put the two-price system on corn. What will you do with the corn people or oats people or those who want to grow any other feed grains? You have a lot of people in the area producing for those who grow chickens and hogs, et cetera. How would your scheme work as to them?

Mr. YODER. The greatest amount of wheat, that is, feed wheat that must be used for feed shortly is owned by the United States Government, the CCC, at the present time. We have those opportunities for disappearance of wheat. Wheat for food is first, 500 million, wheat for export, that is a tight figure most of the time. Seed wheat. You fellows by limiting us, it used to be 75 or 80 million bushels. It may be less now.

Industrial use, which is almost negligible. The only expandable or accountable are the ones that take up the slack would be feed. We have been denied that by the present program all through these years. As a result in place of the wheat being used for feed it has been piling up as surplus. That is the point I want to make there. That is all I have.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.

Mr. Paul Brenner.

STATEMENT OF PAUL BRENNER, RANDOLPH, KANS.

Mr. BRENNER. I live in Riley County. I run a dairy there. Also I am on the board of directors of our extension board. I felt in thinking of something I might say here today, our problem is not altogether legislative. We can do something about our problem ourselves. We took a survey in Riley County of the selected four townships and we surveyed this as to how the farmers farmed in that county. Going down every tenth one in the various townships. I will take one township and give you the results of our survey.

In township A we have 148 farms and we have 20 percent of them belonging to the soil-conservation district. There are 27 of them who test their soil. Zero used lime on alfalfa. 33 used phosphate. On wheat 36 percent, 6 of these farms used nitrogen, 9 used phosphate and on corn 8 used nitrogen and 8 used phosphate.

These are recommended practices through our extension program. This is the problem facing us in our county. On a price of corn at $2 a bushel and $100 an acre land, it takes 30 bushels of corn to break even. We get down to $1.25 a bushel on land, it is 41 bushels. On $200 an acre land at $2 a bushel would be 32 bushels to the acre. Down where it is $1.25, that is about the average yield, it is 46 bushels to the acre.

Our problem is not altogether legislative. It is the farm problem. We cannot legislate laws that are going to help the inefficient, the farmer who is below these marks. It is impossible to do that. Once we provide money, legislative money, to this man who is inefficient, it will just merely help the more efficient man that much more. We have noticed in the last 5 years the gap of the small farmer and the wealthy farmer has become further and further apart, and as we increase our support prices this margin becomes further and further.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, sir.

FROM THE FLOOR. Mr. Chairman, don't you think we ought to stop this making speeches and try to find ways to alleviate this situation? The CHAIRMAN. I hope to get to it in a minute.

Mrs. McKnight.

STATEMENT OF MRS. J. W. MCKNIGHT, ESKRIDGE, KANS.

Mrs. MCKNIGHT. I am Mrs. J. W. McKnight, of Eskridge, Kans., a farmer's wife, and I speak for the livestock farmer of the Bluestem Belt, whose chief product is grass, which must be marketed through livestock on the open market. I maintain that under our present farm program he is not getting a fair break.

I want to picture something of this farmer's philosophy and his concept of government. His philosophy can be stated in three phrases: The dignity of labor, at useful work, to make a better world.

The farmer entered the scene early where he worked hard to provide bread for his family. His concept of government developed logically. He heard the freedom bell; he saw the Statue of Liberty, he read the Constitution which guaranteed him equality and justice. He loved the

flag because it symbolized all these. And so for many years he worked quite undisturbed.

The year 1917 was an important year in world history. My class graduated from college, and we set out to make the world safe for democracy. But there were two other events that made a far greater impact on world affairs: (1) The United States entered the world political arena via the First World War, and (2) the oppressed masses in Russia, by revolution, overthrew the tyranny of the Czars. In retrospect now when Uncle Sam stepped into world politics, he also stepped into the farm picture. Gentlemen, it was not the Democrats or the Republicans, but the inexorable march of history that put him there, and as long as every pronouncement from Washington and every incident in Indochina or Timbuktu has repercussions that reach into every hamlet and farm, he will stay in the picture.

But where in the picture does he belong? Last summer a man who works on the turnpike for $18.50 a day moved his family into a vacant house across the road. When school started he went to Topeka to demand free school lunches for his children. Now this man believes that Uncle Sam should provide the bread for his family, but the farmers of our area believe that it is not the function of government to provide the bread but to create an economic climate in which the man is able to work, and thus provide the bread for his family, and that they should be allowed to choose whether it be white, whole wheat, or rye.

I speak for a farm program that can stand on this philosophy and operate under this concept of government.

The Summary book, compiled by Kansas State extension economists, which I submit with my brief, shows that the farmer who has the highest net income, is the (1) one who derives the smallest percentage of his income from livestock, (2) who has the smallest percentage of his crop acres in legumes, and (3) who has the greatest percent in allotment crops.

I quote, with some omissions, this conclusion:

Although the purpose of allotment crops is to maintain farm incomes at a reasonably high level, their effect is selective. *** Farmers whose allotments represent a small percentage of their cropland and will have to *** content themselves with lower net income.

Unquote, but I did add—

and lower social security payments for the rest of their lives than they are justly entitled to.

In 1954 the average farmer in this bluestem area paid a Federal tax equaling more than 312 percent of his net farm income on the gasoline, oil, and tires that he used in his farm operations, a cost which he has no way of passing on to the ultimate consumer.

Gentlemen, do you know of any other industry that pays a similar tax, not on his production, but on his power for production? Such a tax is manifestly unfair. The farmer would rather have relief from this tax than a dole from the community chest in Washington.

The idea that 6, and only 6, crops are basic in our farm economy, does not seem to fit into our picture. To reward one farmer for continuing to produce a product, which both the foreign and domestic consumer say they do not want, and penalize the man who produces

the high protein foods in which our American diet is efficient, and the world diet pitifully so, is not only unfair, but quite absurd.

I am in favor of discarding the whole parity formula. It is, I think an honest attempt to be fair. It was developed in the day of steam locomotives, model A Fords and quinine capsules and is as completely out of date.

The new modern parity of what the farmer buys includes leather horse collars, baking powder, and three grades of coal, but no weed spray or insecticides, no antibiotics or vaccines or serums of any kind. Today we have electronic brains that can solve the most complicated problems imaginable, and in a split second.

We have mathematicians and engineers who are working out designs for man-made earth satellites. Now if we gave to men like these, factors such as population numbers, foreign demand, domestic demand, man-hour unit, transportation and power costs and a hundred more, do you not think they could determine and come up with that price for each product that would bring our production and demand in balance?

Let us take out of our farm program those things that are unjust and unfair; let's put out a new streamlined 1956 model. Let's go modern.

When industry gets a raise, when steel raises its prices per ton, that is immediately reflected in the farmer's expense. Yet according to this parity formula when we buy a new ensilage fork, to that we will add to what we paid for the fork 10 years behind and divide it by 10. And that is parity. We have been operating on that. There are only 17 years when parity was up to a hundred or higher.

Senator THYE. I would like to say this, Mrs. McKnight, if we put the same intensified study to the agricultural question that we have put on many of our international problems, we would have probably solved our farm problem. If these hearing do anything at all, it will be the sparking of public opinion to give the problem sufficient attention so that it will have serious study and consideration. Your statement, I thought, was a most intelligent statement and it helps to bring to the public attention something that will spark the imagination. We have to do something. There is no question about it. The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.

Mr. Johnson, will you proceed, sir. Give us your name in full and your present occupation.

STATEMENT OF HARRY JOHNSON, MCPHERSON, KANS.

Mr. JOHNSON. I am Harry Johnson, McPherson, Kans. I am a small farmer and I ask that Congress pass a 90 percent parity for the family type farm on every commodity. How do you, as legislators, expect a small farmer to live on less? Big business has had more profit this year than ever before. If you eliminate the small farmer, as we often hear, and go on labor, then it will be too much laborer, then we have to have less hours, more per hour, then it will be the same thing over again.

Big farmers will always get the farm next to them. So let the family type farmer get a bigger base, or I had rather see it go on a unit base, big enough for a family type farmer, Then gradually con