Agricultural Policy and Abundance

CLAUDE R. WICKARD

There has been a farm problem because there has been a nutrition problem. The farmer is prepared:—by the Secretary of Agriculture

If the country pushes ahead in a program of better national nutrition, no one will rejoice more than the farmers. For the more thoughtful among them, it will be a dream come true. The farmer sets the national dinner table. His is the instinct and the tradition of the "good provider," who gives thanks when he sees everyone eating heartily.
From several standpoints, present agricultural policies in this country afford an excellent foundation for putting the United States on a better nutritional level, and the Department of Agriculture itself has done no small amount of pioneering and spade work in this field.
From the standpoint of production, it has been the national policy in the past few years to make agriculture more flexible. As a result of the long decline in foreign markets and the sharp depression of the domestic market in the thirties, agriculture has had to learn to control acreage, hold surpluses, cut down on traditional crops, and divert products to new outlets. The only alternative was a mad scramble of overproduction and soil exploitation in a vain effort to make ends meet at ruinous prices. Such a desperate scramble was forestalled by the legislation that put into effect agricultural adjustment, the ever-normal granary, soil conservation.
The first step, and the hardest in changing from old, fixed patterns to the flexible agriculture modern conditions demand is to achieve adjustment of production on a national scale. Once this step is taken, by means of adequate cooperation and administrative machinery, the adjustments themselves can be made upward as well as downward, according to the need. This is true of both acreage adjustments and storage. Today, the grain stored in the ever-normal granary gives us a constant supply of food and feed that can be turned into the channels of consumption to meet any emergency.
Adjustments already are being made upward for some products right now, in the new agricultural policy designed to furnish food for Great Britain and, simultaneously, to safeguard our own domestic needs. Egg production is to be increased sufficiently to supply British requirements, while assuring the United States as many eggs as we used in the past year of greatest egg consumption. We hope that increased milk production will supply Britain's needs for milk products and still maintain our own average consumption at the level of the past four years. The production of canned tomatoes is being increased by 50 percent over that of last year, and the production of all types of dried beans by 35 percent. Pork production is to be as high as possible; the spring farrowings this year are smaller than last, but the hogs are being marketed at weight above the average, and the total supply should be larger than the average of recent years.
These are some of the products that we would need to produce in greater abundance, according to the nutritionists, if we set out to give everyone in the United States a satisfactory diet. In order to achieve such a goal, it has been figured that we should consume twice as many green vegetables and fruits as we do now (cabbage, green beans, apples, and so on); 70 percent more tomatoes and citrus fruits; 35 percent more eggs; 15 percent more butter; 20 percent more milk. All of these are "protective foods," rich in minerals, vitamins, or both. Further, a great many Americans would benefit by eating more meat than they now can afford to buy.
My first point, then, is that so far as production is concerned, existing national policy has given us a more flexible, more adjustable, less haphazard type of agriculture. We not only have the resources to produce all our people need for better nutrition; we also have the methods. If the nation summons the will to do the job, agriculture can meet the new demands.
I do not mean to imply, however, that there is any reason to feel smug about the adjustments agriculture has accomplished so far. Many problems remain. Thus, we still have surpluses of the three great export crops—wheat, cotton, and tobacco. There is no way in sight by which this country could increase its consumption of these products sufficiently to take care of these surpluses. Even a return to normal world trade would not solve the problem of cotton and wheat surpluses. Here we still need more downward adjustment. We shall have to find other uses for part of the cotton and wheat land. One of the best possible uses would be to dedicate some of this land to the products of which we do need more if we are to build up national health, strength, and stamina. In the South, particularly, more diversification and production for home use are imperative for nutritional as well as for economic reasons.
From the standpoint of distribution, existing agricultural policies are also in line with the nation's nutritional goal. The Stamp Plan is agriculture's baby, and agriculture is inclined to be rather proud of it. The free lunch program for school children and low cost milk distribution also come under agricultural policy. By this summer the Stamp Plan will be reaching five million people and distributing foods worth $10,000,000 a month; and most of these foods are the protective foods especially needed by undernourished families. The free lunch program reaches about five million school children during the school year. Low cost milk is being distributed in six large cities.
These are prime examples of practical cooperative work by city people and farmers. The city dwellers get better diets than they otherwise could afford; the farmers find a market that otherwise would not exist. But this distribution of surplus foods is used almost entirely to meet the needs of people on relief, and it does not begin to meet even those needs. According to the nutritional survey recently completed by the Bureau of Home Economics, at least a fourth of our families not on relief, most of them low income families, have poor diets. At least three fourths of us have unsatisfactory diets. And this in spite of the fact that we are the best-fed nation in the world, with advanced knowledge of nutrition and the greatest food resources on earth.
So far as the fourth of our people with poor diets are concerned, the trouble is largely a matter of distribution, which in turn depends on prices, purchasing power, income.
It is the national policy that farmers shall receive enough for their products to give them a fair return. Within that framework, some economies could be made by improving our marketing processes. A great deal can be accomplished for the farm and village population by extending home production, home and community canning, and community refrigeration. A survey was made last year among rural families in one Ohio community to see how many of them produced enough of their own food to supply their needs. One half of them produced enough milk for themselves; only one out of ten put up enough vegetables to meet their winter needs. In fine dairy sections like upstate New York, many farm families do not keep enough milk for their own use. That farm people should be nourished inadequately when they can raise food just a few steps from their own backdoor is one of the paradoxes of rural life. A drive for home production throughout the rural sections of the United States would mean a vast improvement in the nation's health.
In addition to production and distribution, there are two aspects of agricultural policy that have an important bearing on adequate nutrition for all the people. The first relates to research education. Research into soil conservation, crop improvement, improved livestock strains, more efficient farm and home management, control of insects and plant disease, the scientific elements of nutrition—along all these lines study and experiment must go forward intensively. Along with new knowledge must go the wider dissemination of knowledge. Education is as important to sound diet as are research and production.
Here let me say that in my opinion not only the United States but modern civilization as a whole will have to use scientific advances for the benefit of mankind much more fully, much less half-heartedly, than they have been used so far. We Americans could feed and clothe and house ourselves far better than we do if we dared make the full use of what we know. But we have hesitated, usually for fear we might make a wrong move and upset somebody's apple cart. I think it is time to be afraid that if we do not make some vigorous moves, civilization will have no apples to put in the carts.
The final aspect of agricultural policy that I want to touch on is the broadest of all—"democratic planning." In agriculture, democratic planning has become definitely and, I believe, permanently a part of national policy. The only way farmers could save themselves from ruin in 1932 was by an experiment in democratic planning on a national scale. That experiment has been expanded greatly since 1932 as we all learned how to do the job better. Democratic planning in agriculture extends from the individual farm through the community, the county, the state, the region, to the national government. It deals with an increasing variety of problems as farmers discover that the battles they have to fight are not isolated, single engagements but parts of a broad campaign.
We cannot afford to be smug about what we have achieved in democratic planning so far. But we are over the biggest hurdle—we have made a start. We must go much further than we have, and we shall have to do a good job of it or else.... There is going to be planning in the modern world—either autocratic planning or democratic planning. As I look forward to the condition of the world after this war, I think we can avoid autocratic planning—dictatorship—only by proving that we can do a better job with democratic planning. National nutrition offers a fruitful field for adding to our experience while we build a better, stronger America.