E Is for Egg

When the Government called for more agricultural produce, the 389,469,000 patriotic U.S. hens squawked but then settled down loyally to do their stuff.

Long before last week the result was embarrassingly scrambled. Every U.S. hen, in effect, easily won an E for egg production. Cackling happily, the hens then went on to such a fabulous overproduction that the whole U.S. was practically walking on eggs. The War Food Administration, which had been frantically storing eggs everywhere but in their desks, was thoroughly alarmed. In May the happy hens set a new production record of 6,704,000,000 eggs. In 1,400 freight cars on Midwestern sidings last week were stacked 25,000,000 dozen eggs, getting more dubious by the day.

WFA was desperately digging out. A press-radio campaign begging housewives to buy more eggs had only fair results. For one thing, housewives could not understand why the egg price had to stay up at 55-c- a dozen, when millions of eggs were going bad for lack of buyers. Then WFA sold 100 of the piled-up carloads at $30 each for livestock feed. Critics saw a major scandal. Why, they demanded, were eggs that WFA had bought for something like $6,000 a carload dumped as cattle feed rather than dehydrated or stored? WFA's answers:

P: Both processing plants and storage houses were awash with eggs. The eggs sold for feed were unfit for human consumption but would help relieve a critical feed shortage.

P: Congress has directed WFA to support floor prices. If the agency quit, egg prices would sag to 15 or 20 cents, putting many a hennery out of business. Then, during the normal winter slump, prices might rocket to $1.50 or $2. WFA's job is to maintain the farmer's basic average price of 30-c-. To do this it had to buy up 5,000,000 cases of eggs between January and June of this year, as against a mere 31,000 cases for the same period in 1943.

By week's end egg processors had taken more than half the 1,400 freight cars off WFA's hands. When it gets rid of the rest, WFA says the crisis will be past. By then the seasonal egg slump will have begun, and WFA hopes the hens will observe it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.