Browning chief. [volume] (Browning, Mont.) 1941-1953, 1943-08-06
washington Die;
Food Will Win the War
And Maybe an Election
Washington Politicians Awaken to Fact That
Voting Public, Like an Army,
Moves on Its Stomach
BY BAUKHAGE
Ne,us Analyst and Commentator.

The governor tells me that the
FCA has been used heavily since
the first of the year to see that farm
ers are getting the credit they need
to achieve about production. He ad-
mits that the SO million dollars
loaned to farmers and stockmen
isn't much compared with the total
amount of production financing
which the farmers use in year but
it's something even in these days OF
astronomical lending, leasing and
spending.
The loans are made through the
Regional Agricultural Credit corpo-
ration.
Here are just a few of the facts
Black produced from his briefcase.
Take fiax-aax is as important in
its way as tanks are in theirs. The
automobile manufacturers have had
it made worth their while to manu-
facture tanks instead of autos. The
farmers up intake North Dakota,
for instance-have SHARED the risk"
as Black puts it, with the RACE
(Regional Agricultural Credit corpo-
ration) which extended them credit
to "change over" to flax. Instead Of
one million three hundred thousand
acres of this valuable crop that was
harvested. last year, million
EIGHT hundred and forty thousand
acres were seeded this year ala
per cent government financed).
Take dry beans in Montana: 50,-
,o1I1I hi In,,h14
last years planting, 84.5 per cent of
the crop government financed. I
could 60 down the list with peanuts
in South Carolina, sweet potatoes in
Louisiana and Mississippi, ad infini-
tum.
Simple Machinery
The way this share-the-risk thing
works is simple. The farmer puts
| up his land and labor, the RACE
puts up the out-of-pocket costs after
the county war board and its own
representatives have approved the
| deal.
If the crop comes out all right,
the farmer pays the loan. If it is
wiped out by bugs, drouth or dis
aster (and when or Man River went
hog-wild this spring, there was lot
of wiping out) his liability isn't
wiped out, too, because his liability
is limited to what he took in from
the crop and the incentive payments
or insurance on it.
"It wasn't so much a matter of
how much money was loaned" Gov
ernor Black said to me, "as where
it was loaned and what it was loaned
for. In the past few months, the
country has awakened to the neces-
sity of producing the vital crops to
the limit, and that's where we con-
centrated our financing"
Well, that is one agency that has
been able to 60 ahead without hav-
ing to duck the political brickbats.
Other government agencies, not so
lucky, had to take a lot of punish
ment that wouldn't have been d.
rected at them if it weren't for poll
tics. The poor Commodity Credit
corporation, which everybody seems
to love for itself alone, got into an
unpleasant jam with the subsidies,
and had a tight squeeze partly
through pure politics, partly because
congress and the President didn't
see eye-to-eye on the anti-infation
program.
What most people fail to realize is
this: even now with all the splendid
effort the farmers have made, agri-
culture has not yet been entirely
converted" don't mean convert
ed to the "all-out" idea but convert
ed in the sense that civilian industry
was converted to war production
autos to tanks and planes, sewing
machines to machine guns. In
dustry had plenty of incentive"
The farmers have had some help,
will have more.
And the consumer (who is really
everybody and the farmer and the
worker, haven't gotten it through
their heads yet that unless they all
hang together, they'll hang sepa-
rately.
If we don't get the food, we won't
be able to eat the dollars, no mat
ter how many we may have in our
sock.
The per capita use of eggs in 1912
was 3l6. Prospects for this year
are about 1924 per capita. The army
and lend-lease need about 3 eggs
out of every 10 produced, which
| leaves out Of every 10 for civilians.