AGRICULTURE: How You Gonna Keep ‘Em?

U.S. farmers are now feeling the strangest shortage of the war to date: a shortage of Okies.

Near Buffalo, old Farmer Joseph Peters put down his tools last week, picked up a pen, wrote to his county farm agent in a shaky scrabble:

What are we farmers going to do without any help? And at my age of 75 and the Government taking my man who has been here a great many years? I am left alone and cannot hire a man at any price for they are not to be had. It simply means that I will have to sell all cattle and personal property and let the farm lay idle.

From New York’s truck gardens across the prairie wheat belt to Oregon’s berry fields, many a farmer was in the same spot. Defense has begun to drain off the farm labor supply. Since Army wages look better to low-paid farmhands than to industrial workers, more Army volunteers have come from rural districts than any place else. Some have been drafted. More have quit their jobs to work in new aluminum plants at 60¢ an hour, as carpenters on new Army camps at $7 a day. Many a farmer or potential farmhand is on WPA, NYA or CCC rolls.* Average wage of U.S. farmhands rose from $27.45 and board in April 1940 to $31.56 (highest since 1930) in April 1941. But still it was increasingly hard to keep workers down on the farm.

In Oregon the big strawberry crop was at harvest peak last week. With 27,000 pickers needed, the State was 4,000 shy. In Portland 280 ministers appealed from their pulpits for men to help save the crop; high schools dismissed children of relief families so that they could go into the fields. The State employment service sought workers with broadcasts over five radio stations, handbills in stores and pool halls, a banner-plastered automobile which went roaring over the State.

West Coast Okies suddenly found their services at a premium. Two berry processing companies handed out gasoline credit cards in San Francisco, thus offered free gas and oil for the trip to Oregon. Into Oregon’s migratory camps at night slipped Idaho labor contractors trying to lure workers across the State line.

In Connecticut (where one out of every three farmhands has quit) employment services began registering high-school and college students for summer farm work. Many an Illinois farmer harvested his asparagus crop by hiring high-school children in their spare hours. In Eatonton and some other Georgia towns, police rounded up street loafers, gave them their choice of going to work on farms or to jail. Moaned one farmer: “I’m begging now for the same sorry type of workers I would have run off my farm three years ago.”

To help meet the problem, the Agriculture Department has set up labor committees (now functioning in 30 States) to try to anticipate local shortages, have workmen available where & when needed. Last week draft headquarters asked local boards to go easy on conscripting farmhands. Many a WPA project has been closed to transfer men to farms.

Longest-range solution has been hit upon by farmers themselves: mechanization. Sales of agricultural machinery are up 20% this year, bid fair to set an alltime record by year’s end. To help farmers buy still more machinery, the Agriculture Department has lined up with the farm implement industry for preferred treatment on the materials (steel, aluminum, nickel, etc.) the industry needs. But one shortage always breeds another: in Illinois last week, farm equipment dealers complained that they couldn’t keep enough good service men to make repairs.

* In a Georgia State survey, 14 of 40 county farm agents blamed WPA for labor shortages.