The Painless Cure

As grocer to a famished world, the U.S. found that openhanded promises were far easier to make than deliveries.

As a painless way of meeting commitments to export six million tons of wheat by July i, flour millers last week began to extract 80% of the wheat kernel instead of the customary 68 to 72%. This was no great hardship for U.S. citizens. What the new flour* lost in snowy whiteness it would gain in nutritive value; U.S. bread, usually flat, poor stuff, would gain in taste.

Nevertheless, the new flour might be raising more problems than it solved. Higher extraction meant 30% less "mill-feed," the residue from milling which farmers feed their livestock and poultry. With feed already short, chances were that farmers would hang on to their wheat for feed. They had another reason. They hoped to have ceilings taken off farm products. Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson tried another method, not so painless, to get grain. He boosted the ceiling prices on wheat, now $1.80 1/2 a bushel at Chicago, 3-c-. Up also went corn, 3-c- oats, 2-c- and barley, 4-c-.

The only trouble with this was that Clint Anderson also promised farmers that the ceiling prices for hogs would remain the same until Sept. 1 and the subsidy for "finishing" (fattening) cattle would stay in effect until June 30. Thus, it was still more profitable to feed corn to produce meat than to sell the grain. So whether these piddling price boosts would lure much more grain off the farms was doubtful. Some experts guessed that grain prices would have to be raised somewhere in the neighborhood of from 25-c- to 50-c- a bushel to bring the grain out.

During the war the U.S. had been able to use its grain "wastefully," i.e., convert it into meat instead of feeding it directly to humans, because of its vast stockpiles. Now that the piles were depleted, the U.S. could no longer afford such waste. If the U.S. meant business, it would have to take drastic measures to cut down on its vast numbers of pigs, cattle and chickens, no matter how profitable they are to farmers. But Clint Anderson, too well aware of the powerful farm bloc, plainly hoped that the grain could somehow be found painlessly.

* For a rumor about new flour sacks, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

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