The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-08-20

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 ing has achieved by way of an intangible result, it is to give city fellers some idea of what farmers are up against all the time. If it isn't lack of fertilizer, it's lack of bug juice, insecticide powders, too many kinds of Jap bettle, bean bettle, cut worm, rust or leaf mold, early frost or parching wind, drought or flood, and now @ plain shortage of everyday chicken feed. Life for the farmer is a gamble, every day, and no wonder it's so hard to keep 'em down you know where. Also, who would think that there was national economic signi- ficance in a lot of back alley chick en GOODS? But there is.
 So tight has the national stock feed and grain supply become that the Department of Agriculture has already stopped trying to induct people to raise chickens as means of relieving the meat shortage and the egg shortage. Before long, 1t may be necessary to advise amateur chicken fanciers to let the bullets follow the roosters into the frying pan and be eaten up, just to save the available supply of feed for the professionals who can use 1t most efficiently.
 LIVESTOCK INCREASE
 Statistically, the feed supply in sight for 1943-44 is about II per cent smaller than last year, with the supply of feed grains about 20 per cent smaller per animal unit because the number of animals has been increasing steadily over the past few years and is still going up. Livestock population is up from less than 16O million head last year to over 175 million. Poultry on farms were estimated to number up to $50 million last year, as against over 390 million this year, and there is no way to count or estimate the back yard poultry, even after they're matched. The drain on feed supplies is therefore tremendous, and made more acute by the greater demand for grains for industrial alcohol, corn syrups and sugars, flour and the like.
 That is the general, national pie ture, but this is a thing that can't be generaliZed about. Feed supply is local situation all over the country. Farmers who are holding corn on their farms to feed to pigs will have plenty to feed to barnyard fiocks of chickens if they want to. Poultry raisers who can buy feed supplies in their own localities can get by. CALL FOR
 GOVERNMENT ACTION
 Northeastern U. s. dairymen and poultry men have prepared an esti- mate for the War Food Administra- ton, however, reporting that they will be short nearly IT million tons of feed unless the government takes some action to promote the move- ment of grain from the corn belt into the deficit areas.
 There has been some considera- ton of allocations but nothing has yet jelled. The talk of an elaborate system of allocations, amounting almost to a rationing system that would give pigs so much, beef so much, mutton so much and poultry so much - possibly in return for a blue stamp-can be dismissed as being absolutely unavoidable.
 But distribution can be forced into deficit areas. Commodity Credit Cor poration does this on a limited scale now. It buys corn at ceiling price in Chicago, pays the cost of trans portation to the southeast, and sells it at ceiling price. It doesn't make any money this way, but it gets the grain around whereit will do the most. Enlargement of this prin- ciple might be carried out to keep the animals from going hungry this winter