STATEMENT OF FRANK W. ROBERTS, SECRETARY, CONNECTICUT VEGETABLE GROWERS ASSOCIATION, MIDDLETOWN, CONN.

Mr. ROBERTS. Mr. Chairman and members, no, I think I am the only one. I am speaking for the vegetable industry. However, I had a statement that I would like to make myself. The one I am reading now is for Mr. Lee Aldo, who is the president of the Connecticut Vegetable Growers' Association, who was unable to come today.

The CHAIRMAN. We will just put it in the record. Do you differ from it in any manner?

Mr. ROBERTS. I am secretary of that organization.

The CHAIRMAN. Are you a farmer?

Mr. ROBERTS. Yes; I am.

The CHAIRMAN. We will place his statement in the record at this point, and you may proceed with your own statement.

Mr. ROBERTS. All right. Mine is going to be completely different than his. It is a statement of my own in relation to vegetable price supports.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes. All right. Is this your 1-page statement? Mr. ROBERTS. Yes.

I will be speaking now for Mr. Aldo. He has written this:

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Lee Aldo. I am president of the Connecticut Vegetable Growers Association.

Early in the 1955 Connecticut vegetable growing season our growers were met with low prices for their vegetables as a result of delayed marketing by States south of us. Later we had a prolonged dry spell-the longest on record— which was so severe it caused the loss of many crops. In August the rains and floods came. Some of our growers had their crops completely wiped out. No Connecticut vegetable growers escaped loss from the long period of excessive rainy weather.

Gentlemen, in spite of the above, we Connecticut vegetable growers are opposed to public subsidies and Government price supports for the production of vegetables. Because they decrease efficiency of production, increase cost to the consumer, and in the end involve Government regulation and artificial controls of production itself. We urge all other segments of agriculture to embrace the principle as rapidly as possible and thus avoid the otherwise ultimate socialization of agriculture. We believe that high mandatory supports encourage overproduction, inefficient farming, and lower prices for our agricultural products. We have a keen desire that your committee should know that all acreage removed from production of supported crops be planted or devoted to soilbuilding crops for nonharvested, nongrazing, soil-conserving purposes only, and that such compliance be made a condition of eligibility for any price support or subsidy payment. Legislation is required to define and accomplish this purpose, in the interest of avoiding overproduction from crop to crop and particularly to those crops whose producers request no supports by public moneys.

We urge Congress that we must have a continued favorable ICC ruling regarding motor hauling of agricultural commodities. Fuels for nonhighway uses should not be taxed to support other facilities.

That is the end of his statement.

The CHAIRMAN. All right. Now what is yours? Do you agree with what he states?

Mr. ROBERTS. I do.

The CHAIRMAN. Have you got something different?

Mr. ROBERTS. Mine is just in regard to flexible price supports.
The CHAIRMAN. As affecting vegetables?

Mr. ROBERTS. This is just 1 page here.

My name is Frank W. Roberts. I am a vegetable grower and live on Maple Shade Road in Middletown, Conn. For over 30 years I have grown and marketed over 25 acres of vegetables per year. Much of

this time I have been active in such organizations as the Farm Bureau, Grange, Connecticut Conference on Farm Organizations, and the Connecticut Vegetable Growers Association.

Experience in observing price supports as they work on vegetables in Connecticut has led me to believe they can serve no good purpose. However, I wish to concede that there is a place for them in the socalled basic crops. A basic crop grower cannot, of himself, do anything to influence the market during a depressed price period.

We all know the results of a high price-support program. Huge surpluses pile up, costing millions of dollars for storage space. These surpluses are a constant threat to market prices and make congressional appropriations a must. Farmers in my State are paying through the nose for this program. For that matter, every citizen is paying smartly for a program that isn't solving the problem. It is not altogether the amount of money one acquires through profit, salary, or wages, but what that money will buy in the market place that counts. There is one plan, though started, that hasn't been given sufficient time to show results. That plan is the flexible price-support plan; a plan in which the law of supply and demand can be allowed to work to a certain degree. It has a minimum price for the protection of the farmer, will automatically help to reduce surpluses, and be fairer to all producers and to the consumer.

For years farmers through their farm organizations have been asking for flexible price support. Gentlemen, what I am trying to say to you is this: I think the time has come for people representing us in Congress to take a courageous, statesmanlike, bipartisan approach to the price-support idea.

The CHAIRMAN. All right. Let me ask you this: Are you familiar with the flexible price supports as applied to the dairy industry? Mr. ROBERTS. Not so well, no. I think I have a general idea. The CHAIRMAN. The last time 90 percent price support was applied to the dairy industry was in 1953, put on by Mr. Benson.

Mr. ROBERTS. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. As a condition to retaining it, he asked that the dairy people try to help themselves, but it turned out that many of them still continued to produce under the support prices for Uncle Sam. Well, now, the next year, 1954, we had the flexible price supports. You say that low prices would mean less production, and that less production would mean better prices. That is the sum of your argument, is it not?

Mr. ROBERTS. I think through price supports we are trying to carry through an idea which would cause a reduction.

The CHAIRMAN. All right. I want to bring out that is the only one in which the price is flexed under the law. You say that by the application of the flexible price support that would have a tendency of reducing production, so that production would come more in line with consumption?

Mr. ROBERTS. Of course, I was relating it to the basic crops.
The CHAIRMAN. That is what I say.

Mr. ROBERTS. To grain, et cetera.

The CHAIRMAN. Of course, that has not applied to it yet. It will soon take effect. In 1954 we had the flexible price support on dairy products the production increased from the previous year by over 2 billion pounds of milk and today with flexible price support pro

gram on milk production increase is going to be in excess of 3 billion pounds of milk. What have you to say about that?

Mr. ROBERTS. It has just got me stumped there.

The CHAIRMAN. That is what happened. In other words, with the flexible price support on dairy products we have the greatest production in history.

Mr. ROBERTS. Here I was referring to the huge surpluses of grain,

et cetera.

The CHAIRMAN. You have been speaking otherwise. I just thought that I would put this in the record since you have raised the issue, about tremendous losses.

I have before me here the commodity stabilization service, Commodity Credit Corporation, analysis of programs, and their results from October 7, 1933, through June 30, 1955. That is a period of almost 22 years. Let us go down to the basics. The tremendous costs that you are talking about.

Do you know how much the losses during that entire period were, that is, from October 17, 1933, through June 30, 1955, on the basics, all basics?

Mr. ROBERTS. I would not know exactly.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you know how much it amounts to? I am here to tell you. It amounts to $392,648,091. That is from the Department of Agriculture.

Let us go down the list a little bit. In the case of cotton, you have heard about the tremendous losses that are going to be sustained, probably, and so are led to believe that some have been sustained. Well, the program on cotton shows a profit to the Government of $267,243,797. The loss of peanuts has been $118,111,000. On rice, another commodity, the profit has been $9,315,536. Ón tobacco the profit has been, although small, $187,844, and on wheat to date the loss has been $294,194,673. And that is for a period of 22 years since the support program has been on.

In regard to dairy products, the entire losses amount to about $704 million over the same period. This report shows that the entire net loss, excluding wartime consumer subsidy costs, according to the Commodity Credit Corporation, the entire loss for 22 years on all of the programs, including almost half a billion dollars for potatoes, has been $2,176,646,000. That is the record.

I just thought that I would put that in, in the light of your statement of the tremendous losses on this and that. It is a great pity that we do not have also in this record the amount of about $50 billion that the Government spent in order to reconvert industry from war to peace. [Applause.]

You know of that, do you not? We have had some suggestions during these hearings that since the patriotic farmers of this Nation have responded to a Government to produce all of this food that in order to reconvert from normal production, to try to get the production in line with consumption, that the Government might do something to reduce that plant, set aside some of these acres that have been suggested here this morning and give them reasonable compensation, that is, to the farmer for setting them aside. What do you think of a program of that kind? We did it for industry, why should we not try to do it for the farmers? I am just asking you now, why should we not try to do it for the most important segment of our economy?

In other words, if the farmers of this Nation did not produce, you would not have any nation or any industry. Is that not true? Mr. ROBERTS. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you not think it is incumbent upon us to find some way by which we can put the farmer on his feet, even though it does take a little bit of this expense that you speak of? I would hesitate to say what the consumers of this country would have had to pay if we had not had the surplus in the past war. They would have been the ones to pay, is that not true?

Mr. ROBERTS. That is true.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions?

Senator HOLLAND. You think that the flexible price support program if allowed to continue for a reasonable period of time as to the storable basics will show a reduction in the production of surpluses and the bringing of production into line with the demand, for the reason that you feel that the farmers are intelligent, aggressive, and that when they see that they can no longer produce to sell to Uncle Sam that they will, as a group, move toward reducing production to what there is a sale for?

Mr. ROBERTS. I do. I think until you do something to force the bringing down of this surplus which is always hanging over as a threat to the price and the market, that you will not sell the farmer.

Senator HOLLAND. You did not find that the Irish potato industry, for instance, went crazy and began to produce more when the price support program was cut off for that industry and the great losses to the Government were stopped, but instead they began to reduce production to meet the actual need of the market. You found that, did you not?

Mr. ROBERTS. Yes.

Senator HOLLAND. You know, of course, that up until the war, that is, World War II, there had been no high rigid price supports for basics or anything else, and that the best peace-time program enacted up to that time, or the largest in terms of support, was the 1938 law under which the supports as to the storable basics only were fixed at some 50 to 75 percent of parity and were on a flexible, rather than a rigid basis—you know that, do you not?

Mr. ROBERTS. That is right.

Senator HOLLAND. That was the most generous enactment in this field of the Roosevelt administration, which was known for its friendliness to the farm groups of the Nation. That is correct, is it not? Mr. ROBERTS. That is right.

Senator HOLLAND. And that the 90 percent rigid program applied to basics, and then extended, unfortunately, to other nonstorable items was wholly a war effort designed to produce vastly more than had been needed or used in time of peace and that it was successful in that objective?

Mr. ROBERTS. I realize that, too.

Senator HOLLAND. Do you not feel that a program based on that objective and succeeding in it would continue to have the same result when continued into years of peace and has it not had the same result?

Mr. ROBERTS. It has.

Senator HOLLAND. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, sir.

Our next witness is Mrs. Mary B. Branon.

Give us your name in full, please, and your occupation.

STATEMENT OF MRS. MARY B. BRANON, STATE RURAL LIFE CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC WOMEN, FAIRFIELD, VT.

Mrs. BRANON. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I am Mrs. Mary B. Branon, Fairfield, Vt., State rural life chairman of the National Council of Catholic Women, and the wife of a dairy farmer.

The CHAIRMAN. You may proceed.

Mrs. BRANON. A national farm leader has said "Washington and Wall Street, as well as industry and labor-in fact, most major groups have their eye on rural America." They have been feeling the heavy recession that is peculiar to the families who live by and on the land. Those who think about it with a deep sense of justice feel and rightly so that it is grossly unfair that those who produce food and fiber receive income far below those in other walks of life. Rural Vermont is no different. In the midst of the greatest national prosperity this country has ever known, farmers are suffering very severe hardships.

Despite the efforts of some to try to apply a psychological antidote to the farmers' plight by such expressions as "The farmer is not bad off." "Farmers are going to be better of, hard work and efficiency will triumph in the long run," our Vermont farmers are at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Let us look at dairying, one of our major agricultural operations. The labor situation requires mechanized farming. The quality requirements necessitate mechanized methods. All modern supplies and equipment are costly. The family size farm of, say 30 cows, has long been considered the ideal social and economic unit, but with conditions as they are it is fast passing out of the picture. On units of 40 cows or over the farmer in addition to being a good manager must be a rugged individual able to stand long days of hard work to make income meet actual cost of operation without wages for management. He cannot enjoy any of the favorable working conditions or standard of living enjoyed by most segments of society. If these conditions continue it means the survival of the fittest. Many will be forced out. When enough are eliminated, those remaining can produce profitably but the cost to all consumers will be greatly increased.

Here is a concrete example: Two and a half years ago a young couple purchased a 40-cow farm. The purchase price was three times what the owner paid in 1914. Subsequently and of necessity they purchased tractor, plows, harrows, and a baler. He has made use of all the good farming practices and helps offered by the Extension Service, such as pasture improvement, farm pond, sugar bush improvement. He belongs to a DHIA. That he is not rated as below the average farmer is evidenced by the fact that he was chosen as one of the official milk tasters in the current campaign for improved milk flavor.

By putting in a minimum of 15 hours a day and doing without many so-called necessities in other fields of endeavor-they do not