602 AGRICULTURAL RELIEF 
All that would be required would be small loans for organization 
expenses. The farmers are devilish poor; they need it. You get 
40 or 50 of them together at any place, Chicago or any place else, and 
you will find they simply are not able to pay their way. They have 
got to have some organization help; they have got to send out 
lecturers; they have got to get the farmers to believe in what they 
are doing. : 
To organize wheat producers and establish an American Wheat 
Marketing Board of Control would not cost more than $1,000,000. 
The amount required for smaller commodities would be less. 
To cover the operating cost of handling crops and stabilizing 
prices involves larger sums. That is answering your question, Mr. 
Andresen. But for that purpose under this plan not one penny 
would be required of the Government. 
Pools market wheat for less than 1 cent a bushel. How, then, 
could the necessary operating fund be provided? It could be done 
by the farm marketing boards forming commodity marketing pools 
based on a percentage of the commodities handled. For instance, 
2 cents a bushel on wheat of an average crop of 800,000,000 bushels, 
including seed wheat, would provide $16,000,000. 
I want to say in that connection that this does not mean that if 
an organization, which I will show you in the next sentence, is strong 
enough that that should not be treated by the United States Treasury 
Department or the Federal reserve. It is the same as anyone else, 
and I will show you the reason why. It would not be compulsory, 
because the banks of this country are strong and could furnish every 
dollar necessary to carry out any kind of a proposition, big or little. 
Remember, this is a marketing plan. We have a precedent for 
marketing cost from the Canadian wheat pool, which markets 
100,000,000 bushels of wheat for a fraction less than 1 cent a bushel— 
that is, marketing costs. - An American pool controlling 80 per cent 
of its total wheat production, or 640,000,000 bushels, could cer- 
tainly market for 1 cent a bushel, not over $6,400,000—I mean, that 
is the marketing cost—giving them a net return many times larger 
than its cost or 1 cent a bushel on our average crop of wheat means 
to the American farmers $8,000,000. 
And here is what I wanted to say in answer to this gentleman’s 
question: Credits are based on values. The first thing a bank asks 
for when a loan is applied for is value and a balance sheet. It does 
not make any difference what the organization is, coal, oil, or anything 
else; that is the first thing, if they want several millions dollars or 
several hundred million dollars. Could not a great wheat-marketing 
pool, operating under a charter granted by the Federal Government, 
controlling the wheat for distributing and marketing purposes, with 
warehouse and elevator receipts for six or seven hundred million 
bushels of certified and graded wheat, show a healthy balance sheet? 
It could show a credit basis as great as any institution in the United 
States. Therefore, under organized control, its credit would be 
equal to any other big industrial institution of the country. 
That is bringing it right down to the final concrete operation. 
But you have got to have those things; and no big banking organiza- 
tion or combinations who are lending their money would loan money 
unless they could know that this wheat was under a marketing 
control supported by the Federal Government, so far as its charter