Pig Surprise

Last January AAA sprang its great corn-hog reduction program. The hog part of it provided that every farmer who cut his hog birthrate 25% during 1934 would get a bonus of $5 a head for the other 75%. To many a Midwestern farmer who usually raised 100 hogs this meant $375 of wel- come Government cash if he would raise only 75 hogs. That was what Secretary Wallace had in mind.

But to the hog-raisers of New England it meant something else. A. F. MacDougal farm agent of Middlesex, the county that is a boundary of Boston, wrote to Washington asking whether Massachusetts farmers could cooperate at $5 a hog-head. "Certainly," came back the answer. Like Paul Revere, County Agent MacDougal spread the news through every Middlesex village and farm. Presently he sent to AAA contracts promising that modest Middlesex would--as a favor and for a price--reduce its production from nearly 100,000 per year to 73,000 hogs.

AAA snorted. Dr. Tugwell had never seen a pig near Boston. Farm census takers had never reported a small fraction of that number. Middlesex was trying to get away with an atrocious steal. Just how atrocious was shown by the fact that if Middlesex raised 100,000 pigs it had a bigger pig population per square mile than any other county in the U. S. Before AAA paid Middlesex farmers a dollar it would send investigators to bring Middlesex back to the paths of honesty.

Investigators went. They checked invoices and freight bills to find out how many pigs Middlesex had shipped in former years. They found that Middlesex consumed very little of that staple hog-food, corn; that only 105 farmers claimed to have raised these 100,000 pigs a year; that the piggeries, situated on back roads, were mostly five or six acres in extent, few over 20 acres. But they also found that on each of those farms were littered anywhere from a few hundred to 6,000 or more pigs a year; that they were nourished on the succulent garbage of Boston and sold when six or eight weeks old to farmers throughout the Northeast.

Last week the honor of Middlesex's 105 pig farmers was vindicated. They received checks from AAA for $134,000. That was only the first instalment. They will get $365,000 before the season is over. Eight of them will get over $10,000 apiece. One farmer will get $20,000. AAA is proud of Middlesex cooperation.

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