Details on a Dream for 1942

Der Tag for the American farm revolution was set last week for Sept. 15. Beginning that day, blunt Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard will appear first in Salt Lake City, then in Chicago, New York and Memphis to tell the farmers of each section their role in the greatest food-production program ever conceived.

In 1918 the U.S. asked its farmers for more cotton and more wheat. Today, Claude Wickard's whole idea is to grow less cotton, less wheat and more food. He wants to make dairy products, poultry and vegetables basic crops, as important in the nation's economy as cotton, wheat, tobacco, corn and rice. He wants an over abundance of them because he is satisfied that the national income will grow up to buy it. He sees a chance to put the U.S. on a proper diet for the first time in all its history. He believes that "food will win the war and write the peace" (TIME, July 21). He wants to feed England, to build up food stockpiles of canned foods, preserved dairy products and dried eggs for the rest of the world to use after the war. But most important to him, he sees a chance to break the back of the regional one-crop system which has been the curse of U.S. agriculture for three generations. Gradual steps towards diversification have been taken for years with only slight success. It took the tragedy of world war, of starving people, of men earning big wages producing machines of death to provide the long-sought agricultural opportunity, and Claude Wickard does not mean to let it slip.

Mr. Roosevelt. This new program for less cotton and wheat and more food has the full approval of the President. To keep the price of cotton and wheat from going to still more invitingly speculative levels, Mr. Roosevelt last week vetoed the bill to freeze Government loan stocks of those two commodities. And before this session of Congress is ended, he will probably ask legislation to permit cutting wheat and cotton acreage minima still lower.

But mostly Claude Wickard hopes to cut cotton and wheat production by waving before the farmers' eyes the prospect of high prices for food crops. Before he starts his trip, production goals for 1942 will be announced. Roughly, the U.S. farmer will be asked to:

>Produce 125,000,000,000 pounds of milk -- an 11% hike from 1941's anticipated record production of 112,000,000,000 pounds.

>Slaughter from 51,000,000 to 52,000,000 head of hogs, up 12% from 1941's expected hog slaughter of 46,000,000 head.

>Produce 10% more green and leafy vegetables (sold fresh and for canning) than in 1941.

>Increase poultry and egg production 10% above 1941 peaks.

The requirements are gargantuan. To get 13,000,000,000 more pounds of milk dairy cows will have to be fed 100,000,000 more bushels of corn and feed grains than ever before.

No More Dust Bowl. To make the epochal change the country's agricultural map must be changed--a change that has always historically meant a change in the country itself. The South's economic shackles are to be shattered by a series of gigantic blows. The straggly rows of weevil-bitten cotton-bolls, now pink in the Southern sun as they spread over the rolling harsh red-clay marginal lands, will vanish; lush red tomatoes will shine instead. Fat beef cattle will chomp thick grasses on the rim of the Great Plains, where grow the horizon-filling miles of wheat the world does not want. The little farmer, the one-crop, debt-bowed, pellagra-ridden, hookworm-torpid farmer who has never made money will now be handed the opportunity to knock off his old cash crops. No section of the U.S. will escape. Kentucky's taciturn, gloom-bit tobacco-planters, their markets riddled by Hitler's troops, will be given the chance to adapt themselves to livestock-raising, or fruit and vegetable production. Even the Negro tenant farmer will stop trailing a dusty mule down cotton rows, will lug a foaming milk pail out of his barn.

That is Claude Wickard's dream. But the practical basis makes solider sense than many a previous dreamboat. The Department has been told that $500,000,000 of the Lend-Lease funds have been earmarked for British food purchases in 1942's first six months. Department economists estimate the U.S. will spend $16,000,000,000 of its $90,000,000,000 income this year for food, up from $14,800,000,000 last year, and will spend $18,000,000,000 for food in 1942. On such a scale Wickard can expect as much of a miracle as otherwise would have cost billions in Federal subsidies.

But Wickard's goal is really more ambitious than just to make the U.S. farmer prosperous. He wants the U.S. to eat its way to national health, as well as prosperity. Says he: "What America needs is enough to eat." He isn't worried for a moment over food surpluses breaking the market in a flood of ruin after World War II. His economists tell him that if every person in the U.S. consumed all the dairy products essential to a sufficient, balanced diet, milk production for domestic use alone would have to rise to 135,000,000,000 pounds. This is still 10,000,000,000 pounds above the best output he hopes to get next year. And such figures do not include even minimum food production to feed the ravaged post-war world.

Last week the planning was practically complete. What remained was to blast the U.S. farmer out of his traditional conservatism, prove to him that he had a great future ahead--and then find him enough fertilizer, enough labor and enough machinery and equipment to carry out the plan.

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