FARMERS: Not Bundles But Food

Last week Secretary Claude Wickard gave farmers and their Congressmen a straw to chew. Said he: Britain needs $1,000,000,000 worth of U.S. foodstuffs before February, or—she may lose the war.

Secretary Wickard was urging passage of the new $5,985,000,000 Lend-Lease appropriation in a hurry. So far the total Lend-Lease expenditures for farm products actually turned over to Britain comes to some $200,000,000. Britons, said Wickard, now get only about three eggs per person a month, four ounces of cured pork a week, eight ounces of butter or butter substitutes, half as much animal-protein food as they need. Even with the extra milk, cheese, canned tomatoes, dried beans, fruit, corn and pork that the $1,000,000,000 will supply, Britain will still fight on short rations.

By this calculation, the U.S. will provide 25% of Britain’s food supply. The billion will also be spent in a fashion that will reach more people more directly than at any time since the defense program got under way. Orders . for arms filter slowly into the spending stream, but purchases for farm products, partly because the Department of Agriculture’s Surplus Marketing Administration has long been set up and functioning, can pour out like a flash flood. Half a billion will go for meat, fish, fats, lard — mostly pork. Some $250,000,000 will go for dairy products, another $250,000,000 for poultry and eggs.

Secretary Wickard last week picked big, blond, Iowa-born Roy F. Hendrickson to head the Surplus Marketing Administration, charged with the actual purchasing of food for Britain. A onetime newspaperman who quit writing farm news in order to go to work for the Government’s subsistence homesteads program, the new administrator is typical of many a departmental expert who has grown up under the New Deal. He was only 29, with eight newspaper years behind him (he left the Sioux City, Iowa Tribune when he won a Buick in a lottery), when he joined the Government, soon became Director of Personnel in the Department of Agriculture, moved thence to his new post. U.S. farm income came to $10,000,000,000 this year, but when the Lend-Lease appropriation passes, Roy Hendrickson will administer a program that will put U.S. farm income at an all-time high.