FY
ud

AGRICULTURAL RELIEF
STATEMENT OF A. H. STONE, DUNLEITH, MISS.
Mr. Stone. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I am vice president of
the Staple Cotton Cooperative Association. I might state in the
beginning, gentlemen, that like Mr. Bledsoe, 1 represent a very
small cotton cooperative marketing association. . We are not making
any pretensions as to representing any oreat overwhelming majority
of cotton growers. However, we are ourselves cotton growers,
cotton planters. That question was ‘asked Mr. Bledsoe several
times the other day, ‘and anticipating it, I might say I live on my
plantation. I can not say that that qualifies me, though, particu-
larly one way or another, but I do. I live out in the country, and 1
haven't any other interest in the world. I might say that all the
debts I have are invested in land. [Laughter.]

I haven’t anything else and do not own anything else, and do not
know anything else except cotton growing.

Mr. FoLMER. What is the size of your farm, Mr. Stone?

Mr. Stone. I have 4,000 acres. I cleared it up out of the swamps,
out of the woods, too, the whole business. I have been at it for 37
years, or working with it.

I would very much rather talk to you gentlemen about another,
sort of surplus control, than about cotton surplus right now. The
truth of the thing is that too much water has been the matter with
me. I have almost got it on the brain. I am up here really to
discuss the matter of flood control, rather than cotton-surplus con-
trol. I was under water for 76 days on my property, and ordinarily
I make from 1,800 to 2,000 bales of cotton, and in 1927, I made 8
bales. That is the extent of my interest in the 1927 cotton crop.

We are interested, however, in all agricultural problems, primarily
in problems, of course, concerning cotton. The Staple Cotton Asso-
ciation is purely a service organization. ‘We have tried to serve in
every way we could the area in which we operate. That is an area
of about 7,000 square miles in the alluvial valley, which produces
staple cotton, a cotton of a distinctive type and used for peculiar and
distinctive purposes in trade and manufacture. We try to serve all
the interests of that entire area.

_ We have established a reputation for conservatism and for effi-

ciency, and we feel that we have not only the right but a duty to dis-
charge in the matter of discussing any agricultural problem that
comes before Congress. We represent all of our people, or try to,
not by any formal action on their part, but because we try to study
the entire situation with reference to cotton agriculture, and, of
course, peculiarly the situation with reference to that immediate
territory right there.

. For instance, here is an advertisement that we put in the Wash-
ington Post last week, a full-page advertisement put in there by the
Staple Cotton Association, and it hasn’t a thing on earth to do with
cotton marketing. It is put in there because we, as the outstanding
institution in that area or valley, concerned with the problem of
flood control, are interested in discussing the matter of agricultural
surplus, and we want to do it, and it is our purpose to do it, as a
fundamental problem.

gun study of the agricultural situation in the country at large

particular reference so cotton convinces us that the problem