New Worries

The good U.S. earth is yielding up the first fruits of 1942. Soon summer, moving north, will whiten the grain fields to the harvest--the biggest in U.S. history and the most needed. But to many farmers last week things did not look good.

Farmers had forgotten their chronic worry: low prices and poor markets. Their orders were to produce; and they liked that, because AAAllotments had thwarted their marrow-deep instinct to plant, tend and harvest. Barring too many bugs, too much rain, too little rain, things should have looked good.

Yet they had new worries: about help during the harvest, about harvesting machinery, about boys who might be drafted and girls who could get war work in the cities, about bin space to store the huge crops, about high wages they must pay. Most of all they worried about next year--gasoline, tires, rural isolation, hired men, machines wearing out.

Plenty To Eat. Washington was optimistic. By & large, announced the Department of Agriculture, there was little cause for alarm about food for the U.S. and United Nations--if the weather behaves, if there are enough farm workers, if transportation is available. There is no prospect now of the 1917-18 meatless, wheatless, or otherless days; the total food supply is expected to be the largest ever; plenty of wheat, fresh fruits and vegetables, fluid milk and cream, chicken, eggs, beef, lamb & mutton. And the United Nations have got more than 5,000,000,000 lb. of our food since April 1941, at a paper cost of $650,000,000.

Grade-A Dietitian. To reduce the number of ifs in food, Washington last week got a new initial-agency, Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard got a new job, and the nation got a dietitian.

WPBoss Donald Nelson set up a Food Requirements Committee, put the energetic, ambitious Wickard in charge, gave a nine-man board his blessing and fiat to assess civilian, military and foreign food needs and to control crop plantings to meet those requirements. Nelson cagily kept two checks & balances: as head of the vast production-supply agency, he will O.K. the committee's moves; food-rationing powers remain in the hands of OPA's Henderson.

FRC was given plenty to do: to control production, allocate civilian and military food supplies, get information about U.S. yields, check stocks, control imports and exports of food and farm materials. Newshawks predicted the early establishment of a combined U.S.-British food board, with Wickard as the top U.S. representative.

Last week, calls for farm help resounded through the land. Agriculture Department experts maintained that the labor supply could take care of this year's bumper crops, but admitted acute farm-labor shortages.

In all, 10,796,000 persons worked on U.S. farms on May 1--113,000 more than on the same date last year. This total included 8,399,000 members of farm families; the rest were hired men, women, children. A peak of 12,000,000 farm workers was predicted for July, 13-20% of whom might be women. The clamor about shortages arose because the labor demand grew faster than the labor supply, new hands are less able, and youngsters cannot handle the heavy machinery.

Washington advanced several ideas: to have farmers pool workers; to distribute itinerant workers evenly; to reduce train rates to provide better transportation for possible farm hands; to set up a central authority to manage the transfer of available farm hands. Agriculture Department planners seriously considered a subsidy scheme whereby farm wages would be forced up to the highest levels farm operators could afford. Then the Government would pay the difference between that and the level at which industrial wages become too alluring for farm boys to resist.

Land Army. Out in the country, out where strawberries got overripe for want of pickers, where hay was ready for the barns, where cotton needed chopping, farmers and officials took direct action. This meant sweat and calluses and ten hours daily (but good wages) for city-soft schoolboys, girls and women.

> Three southern Illinois counties told some 500 WPAers they must pick strawberries or become ineligible for relief. Result: some violent refusals, some sabotage of vines, but $6 a day for those filling 200 boxes.

> New York planned to ask every available man from 16 to 50 to help harvest crops, 5-32% bigger than last year.

> The U.S. Employment Service enrolled 10,000 New Jersey high-school pupils for farm work, recruited farmerettes for a land army, welcomed 127 women to vegetable and berry farms.

> In the Northwest, the U.S. Employment Service proclaimed: "Spend your weekends working on nearby farms. Spend your vacations in the Yakima and Wenatchee Valleys, or in the Willamette or Hood River Valleys," offered "healthful camping-out experience," hoped thereby to find some of the extra workers needed (69,700 in Washington alone).

> Over 1,200 adolescents in 32 high schools in & near Kansas City joined a Farm Emergency Army.

> Throughout the U.S., one fair board after another announced abandonment or curtailment of big & little fairs and expositions--functions as American as apple pie, as dear to farm families as family reunions, as sure as the harvest moon itself.

> Near Clarksville, Tex., rain jeopardized a $20,000 pea crop. The whole town (pop. 4,000) closed drum-tight, went to the fields, saved the peas.

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