End & Beginning

Farm relief last week actually began its journey from the field of legislation to the husbandman's acres. The Congress, straining and wheezing, passed an administration bill, minus the export debenture plan and President Hoover, signing it with a smile and two pens, called it "The most important measure ever passed by congress in aid of a single industry." It was an end and a beginning.

Much legislative maneuvring was necessary to get the measure through to the White House. First the Senate, full of ill temper, refused by a vote of 46 to 43, to accept the conference report in which the export debenture plan was stricken from the bill. President Hoover was openly flouted by those who either honestly believed in this plan or felt that the House, heretofore gagged, should be given a chance to express itself. Speaker Longworth and other leaders had refused to give the House a vote on the debenture plan for two reasons: 1) it would force midwestern Congressmen to go on record on a politically troublesome issue; 2) it would be a backdown by the House on its claim that the Senate had no constitutional authority to originate such a "revenue-raising" plan.

Not until President Hoover called House and Senate leaders into conference was the way cleared for the bill's enactment. Exerting himself as party chief, the President virtually ordered that the House vote on this question as the Senate's price of recession. So the House voted 250 to 113 against the debenture plan. The next clay, as gracefully as possible, the Senate acquiesced.

When President Hoover picks the members of the now authorized Federal Farm Board, there will come into existence an agency for agriculture comparable in scope and authority with the Interstate Commerce. Commission for transportation, the Federal Reserve Board for finance.

The board will be composed of eight members selected by the President and confirmed by the Senate, plus the Secretary of Agriculture ex officio. It will have a working capital of $500,000,000 supplied from the U. S. Treasury. With this cash to lend, it will try to induce farmers to forego some of their normal independence, to join co-operative marketing associations. These associations, with money borrowed from the board, will attempt to moye food from farm to market more cheaply, with less spoilage and waste, than is now accomplished by scattered and individual private effort.

Less than one-third of the 6,500,000 U. S. farmers are now members of joint selling organizations. Success of farm relief now depends almost entirely upon the extent to which the farmers will now co- operate. Many experts believe that more than two-thirds of the farmers must join co-operatives before any appreciable benefit will accrue to husbandry as a whole.

A second important task of the new board will be to help organize and finance special stabilization corporations among farmers to purchase surplus farm products from glutted seasonal markets and hold them in storage pending better prices. In the past such large-scale grain corporations on private capital and under private control have failed. It remains to be seen whether federal cash and supervision can make them successful. Critics of the new farm relief legislation predict that the Federal Farm Board will loan large sums to such corporations which in turn will buy in surplus commodities on a falling price market, be forced to sell them at a still lower price and, in the end, completely exhaust the board's capital.

Last week the Great Question on many a farm throughout the land was: Will there be federal relief for this year's crops? Wheat men, dubious of such relief this season, pricked up their ears at a suggestion from North Dakota's Senator Nye that the U. S. should buy up 50 or 100 million bushels of surplus wheat, ship it to famished China as a gesture of goodwill.