Abundance--Perhaps

The 1945 crop year promises to be curious. Last week, while outgoing Secretary of Agriculture Claude Raymond Wickard was releasing one of the most optimistic June crop forecasts in U.S.

history, incoming Secretary Clinton Presba Anderson was touring the West, talking prices with farmers, cautioning them against optimism, and trying to discover: i) why, despite heady crop reports, the U.S. still has a food shortage; 2) what government can do about it.

The June forecast was very good, if not quite so good as it looked: a wheat crop of 1,084,652,000 bu. (the largest ever); crops of oats, hay, some, fruits, and potatoes all promise to be well above average. The joker in all this is freakish weather. Part of Texas has had a record drought, part of Oklahoma has had too much rain and part too little. And many states have good prospects provided the freakish weather does not continue much longer, something that is highly problematical this year, as always.

Corn Means Hogs. Potentially the most dangerous situation is in the corn crop, which in June cannot yet be estimated. But cold, drizzly weather has delayed planting and retarded growth. In many areas where corn usually would be knee high it was barely ankle high or not yet planted. It could still develop a fine crop or be ruined. Said Anderson, looking at the spindly young corn: "A short corn crop could be a calamity." On the corn crop will depend the prospect of meat next year, for every five pounds of corn makes a difference of about a pound of meat on a hog.

But Mr. Anderson was mostly concerned with things about which he can soon do something. Before he becomes Secretary at the end of the month he will report his findings on food shortages to the House. From the hearings of his committee and his researches in the field, the probable tenor of his report was clear: present food shortages are largely a mat ter of government bungling in fixing prices.

(Example: in the summer of 1943 the ceiling price on corn was so low and the price floor on hogs so high that it was more profitable to use corn to fatten pigs than to sell it. Result: a large hog population, but no pork on the butcher's rack and an acute shortage of feed for Eastern dairy cows.) Weather Means Everything. With farm groups last week -- at Omaha, Min neapolis, Yakima, Wash. -- Anderson made a highly favorable, sense-making impression, discussing how to work out a sys tem of price relationships that would provide incentives for the production of grain, for converting enough of it into meat and for getting that meat to market.

But the best calculated measures of the new Secretary of Agriculture can still be badly upset by acts of God. If the corn crop is very short, it will be impossible to fatten enough cattle and hogs, even if prices make fattening profitable--light beef of inferior quality may be forced on the market when ranges dry up. Conversely, if the weather continues wet and the corn fails to harden before frost, there may be so much soft corn, unfit for storage, that too many cattle will be kept on that cheap feed instead of going to market.

Even the effect of weather on the nation's victory gardens, whose tiny crops collectively add much to the U.S. food pile, may be serious. Many such gardens have been damaged by rain and late frost. Should the backyard farmers fail to replant and secure good crops, there will be a heavy additional drain on commercial food sources.

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