FARMERS: 1937 Model

Borrowing a campaign simile from Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace last fortnight compared his 1936 soil conservation program and forthcoming 1937 plan as follows: “The two will be as nearly alike as the 1937 and 1936 models of automobiles. We think we have perfected a new carburetor for the 1937 program.”

Last week Secretary Wallace put his 1937 model on display for farmers’ inspection. Costing the same $500,000,000, it was basically identical with the apparatus whipped together last spring after the Supreme Court had ruled the AAAct off the road. As a reward for diverting their acres from “soil-depleting” crops (cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco) to “soil-building” crops (alfalfa, soybeans, grasses), farmers will receive Federal bounties averaging slightly less than $10 per acre. Thus, by the back door of soil conservation, the New Deal will continue to achieve some production control of cash crops, which the Supreme Court has forbidden it to approach directly.

No matter how small his farm, it was announced, any farmer could get at least $20 from the Government next year, as compared with a minimum $10 this year. Secretary Wallace said his “new carburetor” was an explanation of schedules by which each farmer could figure out his bounty in advance. But knowing newshawks pounced on a discreetly buried item in the announcement as the 1937 model’s new power source.

Fundamental difference between the AAAct and its current substitute is that under the former the farmer was bound by contract to reduce his cash crops by specified percentages. Now he reduces them voluntarily within Department of Agriculture specifications and is rewarded according to the extent of his cooperation. But to control next year’s corn crop, the Department last week proposed to set definite acreage limits, enforced by an extra reward and a penalty.

In those parts of Kansas and states of the North Central region where corn is the chief crop, farmers will be told how much corn to plant, get an extra 5% added to their soil-diversion bounty if they obey. If they exceed their planting limit, there will be a deduction for each extra acre. Thus the Department, fearing a surplus which would send corn and hog prices crashing, hopes to bring corn acreage from 1932-33’s 59,000,000 and last year’s 54-500,000 acres down to some 54,000,000 acres. Reluctant to discuss the matter. AAA legalites nonetheless conceded that this production control was quite as direct as that achieved under the AAAct. They expected to get away with it because of the obvious difficulty a complainant would have in getting the law into court for a test case. If it should escape the Supreme Court’s interdiction, the scheme could easily be extended to all the other cash crops which the AAAct was created to control.

Whether the New Deal and its farmer friends would long be satisfied with such roundabout methods remained a prime question. Red-hot for revival of the AAAct, Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, is the New Deal’s most potent rural friend, the American Farm Bureau Federation. To its convention in Pasadena last week, Secretary Wallace declared: “Good as [the AAAct] was, we want to see it improved upon. A better program can and will be built.”

Cried AAAdministrator Howard R. Tolley to the federated farmers: “If I understand the temper of the farmers correctly, they are in no mood to let legalistic barriers and finespun interpretations keep them from having equality with large corporations in meeting nation-wide problems of production and prices. And if they are almost buried once more under mountainous surpluses, I think they will be even less tolerant of man-made barriers in the path of progress.”