No Time To Rejoice

Now comes the satisfying time when earth and farmer should take their ease, when the season's reckonings should be made: the biggest U.S. crops (10% above 1941 yields), the richest marketings ($15 billion). But last week was a time of foreboding.

Claude Wickard sounded an ominous warning. By year's end industry and war may have taken two million more young men from the farms. Next year there will be less labor, less machinery, probably less beneficent weather--but a bigger demand for food. Sooner or later, said the usually optimistic Secretary of Agriculture, legislation may have to come to keep workers on farms, for farmers cannot pay wages to compete with industry.

To the House Agriculture Committee the Secretary's statement was just so much hogwash. Well they knew how the Administration had failed to see the danger of labor shortages in time, had failed to act. Snorted Minnesota's dour-faced August Andresen: "There are too many desk farmers in Washington. Fellows who think they can get milk by turning a spigot. Somebody ought to tell them about farming. They haven't done a damned thing about this problem in six or eight months and it's growing more serious all the time."

The Congressmen saw little virtue in Wickard's proposals to keep experienced managers on farms, transport migrants to critical areas, train inexperienced farm workers, use more women, children and oldsters on farms. The Congressmen hinted that they would have to pass either a law to subsidize farmers, so they could compete with industry for workers or to draft workers for farms.

Meantime, two small steps were actually taken:

> Five hundred Mexicans arrived in Stockton, Calif., to help save the sugar-beet crop. They entered the U.S. under agreement with Mexico which, remembering that thousands of Mexican laborers were stranded in the U.S. after World War I, insisted on stiff wage and work guarantees for the emigrants.

> Arizona cotton growers urgently appealed to the War Department to permit idle Japanese in relocation camps to go to work in long-staple cotton fields; 177 Japanese volunteered (out of 11,000 available) but they were mostly city men, could pick hardly half as much as experienced farm hands.

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