Plague of Plenty

For a while it looked as if the U.S. farmer could blithely ignore the law of supply & demand.

When he grew more wheat or collected more eggs than the public would buy at his price, the Government's Commodity Credit Corp. bailed him out. That was all right during the war, when CCC, with $4,750,000,000 to draw on, could sell whatever it bought. Even as late as June 1948, CCC had laid out a mere $294 million. But in the 16 months since, CCC purchases--to keep the farmer's income up--had increased fantastically. Last week CCC President Ralph S. Trigg announced that CCC had tied up more than $3 billion in mountains of produce it could not get off its hands, and indicated that it would probably have to spend another billion by next June.

By such buying, the U.S. Government had become the nation's No. 1 warehouse, currently stuck with more corn, wheat and cotton than that held by aU the private firms in the nation. Among the items laid up in Government storehouses, grain elevators and cold-storage caves:

230 million pounds of dried milk.

95 million pounds of butter.

22 million pounds of Cheddar cheese, stored mostly in Wisconsin.

64 million pounds of dried eggs (the equivalent of 192-million-dozen eggs).

35 million pounds of Mexican canned meat (bought in a deal which allowed the U.S. to invade Mexico to stamp out the foot & mouth disease).

172 million bushels of wheat.

83 million bushels of corn (and about 300 million bushels more expected by next May).

3,750,000 bales of cotton.

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