Annual Report

The six million U.S. farmers took in $19 billion last year. That was $3.5 billion above 1942 and more than twice as good as their $8.5 billion average for the five years 1935-39-This bumper harvest of dollars was partly due to higher prices. For their produce farmers collected about 20% more than they charged in 1942. At year's end farm prices had soared to 15% above "parity," and the ill-famed farm lobby, with nothing much remaining to fight for, was left brooding over new formulas for a bigger and better "parity."

But the farmers' lush income was not all due to price inflation. Much of it they had earned the hard way, by longer hours of sweat, toil--and some cause for tears. After a wet late spring that brought disastrous floods and killing frosts, they plowed and seeded from sunup to midnight. Some worked by moonlight; others -rigged up floodlights, or mounted battery-operated searchlights on their tractors.

In Iowa Will E. Jacobs, 67, and three other neighbors aged 60, 67 and 72 pooled their feeble manpower, collectively worked their 900 acres of farm land. In Minnesota, stocky, soish Oscar Berning and his teen-age son handled all the work on 375 acres. In the year of great need the farmers, despite fatigue and a wartime loss of three and a half million workers, produced 32% more food than they averaged in 1935-39.

The remarkable feature of the 1943 farm income was the sum the farmers managed to carry over to net profits. Despite soaring feed costs and fabulously high wages demanded by the few workers available, the U.S. farmers' net profits--out of a gross of $19 billion--are estimated at $12.5 billion. This 65% profit ratio scared the economists. With the farmers jingling so much inflationary money in their pockets, some economists fear another runaway land boom.

But all the evidence shows the farmers

have scant interest in more land. Their

dream of a postwar Utopia is less work,

fewer acres, more tractors and better housing. For their ticket to Utopia they have loaded Federal Reserve member country banks with $17.5 billion of demand deposits--almost three times 1940'$ $6 billion.

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