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