The Farmers Come Through

One of the most heartening U.S. communiques of the war came out last week. It came not from the Army or Navy but from the Agriculture Department's Crop Reporting Board. CRB's latest report--on 1942 farm planting--was, as usual, statistics-crammed, unreadable. But in the light of Secretary Claude Wickard's maxim: "Food will win the war and write the peace" (TIME, July 21), CRB's communique showed that the U.S. had won the first big engagement in the Battle of the Soil.

When Secretary Wickard boosted and re-boosted food-production goals last fall, he had only hope. The report showed that U.S. farmers are hard at work on the war-time quotas; if they get sufficient labor for the harvests, they will come through.

Wickard asked for 13% more eggs; the farmers by February had already given him 15%. He asked for 9,000,000 acres of soybeans; the farmers planned to plant 14,000,000. He asked for 8% more corn, to be fed to more hogs and cattle; the farmers promised 5% plus a barley expansion which would make up the difference. Only in peanuts were plantings behind the goals; instead of the 255% increase he asked for, he will get but 66%.

Except for sugar, soon to be rationed, and fats & oils, once imported in quantity from the Far East, U.S. farmers had the food situation well in their plow-calloused hands. They were doing better than the Washington food bureaucrats. A half-dozen Government agencies were dabbling in the food problem, with well-confused results. The Agriculture Department's sugar section and Leon Henderson's Office of Price Administration, among others, played with sugar rationing. Nearly everyone had a hand in the fats & oils market: Agriculture, OPA, State Department, Board of Economic Warfare, WPB's food section, Jesse Jones's Defense Supplies Corp., even the British Purchasing Commission.

Then WPBoss Donald Nelson began to sweep up the mess. He gave OPA full control over sugar, offered the Agriculture Department a lone hand in fats & oils. With these two trouble spots cleared away, and the man behind the plow working as never before, the nation's prospects in the Battle of Food were looking fine.

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