Harvest without Harvesters

The reapers and combines had gathered in the sheaves of grain. Now comes the peak time for harvesting other crops, work in which machines have not yet taken a man's place. And this fall there are bigger crops than ever in the U.S. but fewer human harvesters:

> In California's rich valleys beet fields were plowed under and 4,000,000 pounds of sugar were lost every day for lack of workers. Growers begged for 30,000 extra men--cityfolk, school children, convicts, soldiers--to save grapes, pears and peaches from rotting.

> Half of Arizona's cantaloupes have spoiled in the fields. Ten thousand acres of costly alfalfa went to seed uncut. The State's output of long staple cotton, threefourths of the U.S. supply and used for parachute web and machine-gun belts, is threatened. Casa Grande valley farmers paid $4 a day for workers they used to get for $40 a month--and saw those farm hands go off to $1.12-an-hour jobs building camps for 10,000 relocated Japanese. Most of the Japanese are farmers from California; now they sit idly in the shade, watching the barracks go up.

> Washington needs 8,000 men & women to reinforce 34,000 workers in hop fields and orchards.

> Oregon's sugar beets were endangered.

> Texas growers of long staple cotton have called for 35,000 additional pickers within 30 days.

> In the East, rains have softened tomatoes and made early harvesting imperative. New York apples, Maine potatoes, Georgia peanuts are close to spoiling.

The grim fact is that war-needed food is going to waste. But even grimmer are two other facts: 1) the Administration, after wringing its hands for ten years over problems of migrants who, like waves of misery, used to follow the crops, has awakened too late to the fact that the Joads are immobilized by lack of tires or are abandoning their calling for lush war jobs; 2) next year will be even worse. This week the Government haltingly moved to save what could be saved. It rounded up 183 migrants in the Virginias, put them on buses and trains for New York orchards, looked for more recruits in Ohio and Tennessee. Next week it hoped it could begin importing 5000 Mexicans. Cost of these "pilot programs": $500,000.

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