Costs & Cattle

While President Roosevelt was last week telling newshawks in his air-cooled White House office how he proposed to inspect the drought area next month, a pert newshawk asked if by any chance he would make a few political speeches on that trip. A deep frown gullied the President's face. Drought, he snapped, was much too serious to mix with politics.

Meanwhile the Democratic National Committee was bragging: "The entire country is applauding the swift, energetic and efficient manner in which the Roosevelt Administration is moving to the relief of drought victims in the Great Plains states. . . . Think what a calamity it would be if the Hoover doctrine were in force!" In five days WPA placed 16,500 farmers on relief projects, made ready to handle another 58,500. The Resettlement Administration declared a one-year moratorium on some 30,000 rural rehabilitation loans, prepared to pour out $18,000,000 for crop loans and feed. With Secretary of Agriculture Wallace vacationing in Colorado, the AAA continued to amend its soil conservation program, permitting farmers to cut for forage soil-depleting crops hitherto condemned to be plowed under.

Last spring a minor drought was confined to the Dust Bowl of the Southwest, and to Midsouth states where livestock was already on the move northward & southward to greener fields. Last month it swung up along the high edge of the Great Plains to the wheat regions of the Dakotas. By last week, after 32 blistering days without a drop of rain, fields in that area yielded nothing but crisp brown stubble. At Mitchell, S. Dak. 11,000 citizens knelt to the tolling of bells in the town's 13 churches one morning last week, devoutly prayed for rain, got none. Instead Dakotans were promised this week a visit from a scouting party of top-flight New Dealers headed by Resettlement Administrator Rexford Guy Tugwell and Acting WPAdministrator Aubrey Williams. Farmers in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa predicted a 50% loss unless rain came within a week. Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri reported that, rain or no rain, they would be lucky to harvest half their normal crop. At week's end, estimated cost of the drought to farmers: $300,000,000. Total persons affected: 5,000,000.

Nevertheless the Federal Crop Reporting Board, giving its July 1 estimates of agricultural production last week, concluded that conditions, bad as they were, were so far not so dismal as in 1934.

Drought kills sheep and cattle as effectively as crops, if more slowly. Cattle need water, need feed even more. Since 70%, of all crops go for forage, U. S. farms mainly serve as meat factories. Last week the beef cattle situation, though it made no great headlines, was causing the Department of Agriculture its principal worry. Throughout the stricken cattle country water holes and ponds had dried into cakey mud. Unless farmers could raise a bumper autumn crop of forage, which seemed unlikely, cattle would die by droves this winter. One of the states hardest hit by the drought of 1934, which reduced the total U.S. cattle herd some 9,000,000 head below normal, was North Dakota, which lost, either by forced slaughter or shipping, 1,000,000 animals. One of the states hardest hit last week was also North Dakota which would have to sell or ship 500,000 cattle immediately.

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