592 
"AGRICULTURAL RELIEF 
At $1.15 a bushel, delivered at local elevators, this amounts to 
$736,000,000. 
I wanted to call special attention to those two commodities. 
There are 10 organizations controlling one of the products, and 14 
States, which may be regarded as 14 corporations, controlling the 
other. 
If wheat were marketed at the same proportion between produc- 
tion, cost and selling price as steel is, and the price stabilized, as is 
that of steel, the wheat producers’ income would be increased 
$320,000,000 a year. The turnover in steel is figured at two and a 
half times a year. Wheat is confined to one crop a year. Steel is 
always sold at a substantial profit because it is organized. Wheat 
is sold for less than cost of production, because it is unorganized. 
Here we have two distinctive commodities, both basic in value. 
One is produced through manufacturing; the other is produced from 
the soil; but both are basic, and both credit values should be the 
same. Wheat, if organized under an organization to control its 
marketing and its distribution and conducted on the same business 
principles as steel, would be equally as profitable to wheat growers. 
It is such enabling legislation as would permit this that I would 
like to lay before your committee. Understand, Mr. Chairman, I 
am not presenting a bill; I am only talking of business principles. 
The CuATRMAN. Your statement is very interesting, I am sure. 
Mr. Yoakum. I am speaking of methods that will really and com- 
pletely place farming on the same business level and equality with 
other industries. We talk a great deal about that. We talk about 
getting the farming interests on the same level. And farming can 
only be placed on the same level through the same processes and 
methods as are adopted by other industries, and that is control of 
prices. It is the price. after all: it is the marketing that is the great 
problem. 
Wheat is produced: on about 1,300,000 farms, averaging 665 bushels 
to the farm, to be sold at prices fixed for them by others. 
Consumers in this great food-producing country have paid for 17 
standard food products, taking those values from the Department of 
Agriculture, twenty-two and a half billion dollars, of which the 
farmers received only seven and a half billion dollars, leaving a 
spread between the man who produces and the man who consumes 
of $15,000,000,000 to handle a crop of our foodstuffs. 
Now, I have here this prepared statement which I will leave with 
you as Exhibit A. This exhibit shows the distribution as to where 
this money goes, and it is correct. It shows where this great problem 
rests. 
The food business has grown to such great proportions in our large 
distributing centers—in fact, in all of our small centers—that it is a 
great encouragement, a great inducement. If you will permit me 
to say it, I live in the country; I live on a farm. I pass in the morn- 
ings on one block—and I have called attention dozens of times to 
people riding in with me to the fact—where we have six grocery 
stores—six stores all selling practically the same stuff; that is, in that 
one block six rents, six clerk hires, six deliveries, and all of it could 
be done, easily accomplished, by one. 
For that reason we have reached a situation in this country where 
there are 19,000,000 “food dealer population”’—we are taking this