Mr. PURNELL. This bill authorizes, as you will remember, the more complete enjoyment of agricultural experiment stations. I do not think I will go to the extent now, because these gentlemen will be here any minute, to make a statement with regard to the bill. I have a statement prepared that I will incorporate in the record at the proper time. (The bill is printed as follows:) [H. R. 157, Sixty-eighth Congress, first session.] A BILL To authorize the more complete endowment of agricultural experiment stations, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the more complete endowmnt and maintenance of agricultural experiment stations now established, or which may hereafter be established, in accordance with the act of Congress approved March 2, 1887, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated, in addition to the amounts now received by such agricultural experiment stations, the sum of $15,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1924; $25,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1925; $35,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1926; $45,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1927; $55,000 for the fiscal year en·ling June 30, 1928: $65,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1929; $75,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1930; $85,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1931; and $85,000 for each fiscal year thereafter, to be paid to each State and Territory; and the Secretary of Agriculture shall include the adlitional suns above authorized to be appropriated in the annual estimates of the Department of Agriculture, or in a separate estimate, as he may deem best. The funds appropriated pursuant to this act shall be applied only to paying the necessary expenses of conducting investigations or making experiments bearing directly on the production, manufacture, preparation, use, distribution, and marketing of agricultural products and including such scientific researches as have for their purpose the establishment and maintenance of a permanent and efficient agricultural industry, and such economic and sociological investigations as have for their purpose the development and improvement of the rural home and rural life, and for printing and disseminating the results of said researches. SEC. 2. That the sums hereby authorized to be appropriated to the States an Territories for the further endowment and support of agricultural experiment stations shall be annually paid in equal quarterly payments on the 1st day of January, April, July, and October of each year by the Secretary of the Treasury upon a warrant of the Secretary of Agriculture out of the Treasury of the United States, to the treasurer or other officer duly appointed by the governing boards of such agricultural experiment stations to receive the same, and such officers shall be required to report to the Secretary of Agriculture on or before the 1st day of September of each year a detailed statement of the amount so received and of its disburesment on schedules prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture. The grants of money authorized by this act are made subject to legislative assent of the several States and Territories to the purpose of said grants: Provided, That payment of such installments of the appropriation herein authorized to be made as shall become due to any State or Territory before the adjournment of the regular session of the legislature meeting next after the passage of this act shall be made upon the assent of the governor therof duly certified to the Secretary of the Treasury. SEC. 3. That if any portion of the moneys received by the designated officer of any State or Territory for the further and more complete endowment, support, and maintenance of agricultural experiment stations as provided in this act shall by any action or contingency be diminished or lost or be misapplied, it shall be replaced by said State or Territory to which it belongs, and until so replaced no subsequent appropriation shall be apportioned or paid to such State or Territory, and no portion of said moneys exceeding 10 per centum of each annual appropriation shall be applied directly or indirectly, under any pretense whatever, to the purchase, erection, preservation, or repair of any building or buildings or to the purchase or rental of land. It shall be the duty of each of the said stations annually, on or before the 1st day of February, to make to the governor of the State or Territory in which it is located a full and detailed report of its operations, including a statement of receipts and expendi tures for the fiscal year next preceding, a copy of which report shall be sent to each of the said stations and the Secretary of Agriculture and to the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. SEC. 4. That on or before the 1st day of July in each year after the passage of this act the Secretary of Agriculture shall ascertain and certify to the Secretary of the Treasury as to each State and Territory whether it is complying with the provisions of this act and is entitled to receive its share of the annual appropriations for agricultural experiment stations under this act and the amount which thereupon each is entitled, respectively, to receive. If the Secretary of Agriculture shall withhold from any State or Territory a certificate of its appropriation, the facts and reasons therefor shall be reported to the President and the amount involved shall be kept separate in the Treasury until the close of the next Congress in order that the State or Territory may, if it shall so desire, appeal to Congress from the determination of the Secretary of Agriculture. If the next Congress shall not direct such sum to be paid, it shall be covered into the Treasury. The Secretary of Agriculture is hereby charged with the proper administration of this law. SEC. 5. That the Secretary of Agriculture shall make an annual report to Congress on the receipts and expenditures and work of the agricultural experiment stations in all of the States and Territories, and also whether the appropriation of any State or Territory has been withheld; and if so, the reason therefor. SEC. 6. That Congress may at any time amend, suspend, or repeal any and all of the provisions of this act. Mr. PURNELL. My witnesses are here now, Mr. Chairman, and I will ask you to hear first Dr. A. R. Pearson, president of Ames College and chairman of the executive committee of land-grant colleges. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will be pleased to hear from you, Doctor Pearson. STATEMENT OF DR. R. A. PEARSON, PRESIDENT OF AMES COLLEGE. Doctor PEARSON. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I thank you for the opportunity to come before you. We are the executive committtee of the Land Grant College Association. We have come to talk with you in reference to the agricultural situation. and the relation of the so-called Purnell bill to that situation. Everybody knows that the agricultural situation is serious and has been for a long time. I do not think it is necessary for me to tell members of this committee that in some of the very large sections of the country it is getting worse instead of better. The agricultural colleges have an unusual contact with the farmers, and we are fairly well qualified to state to you what the situation is, and we hope that you will feel that we are well qualified to make certain recommendations to Congress. We are in touch with agriculture very intimately, through the fact that we are living among the farmers. There is one of these landgrant institutions in every State. In every case the college has a well-organized extension service with a large number of experts and specialists, that reaches every part of the State. We are having countless interviews with fathers and mothers who come from the farms of this country, who are interested in the one thing that interests the parents more than anything else, that is, the welfare of their own children. They come to us and talk about the problems of education and how they may get the best results under the present conditions. We have very extensive correspondence. In the institution I represent it is a common occurence to receive over a thousand letters in a single day, and almost all of them are in reference to some one phase or another of agriculture. Now, Mr. Chairman, these colleges, being founded on a national Act, and receiving a considerable part of their support from national funds, represent in a very peculiar way the national government itself in dealing with the farmer; and that fact, to our satisfaction during the war and to our sorrow now, was recognized by the Government when they called upon these colleges to be the chief agency of the government in stimulating agricultural production, food production for war purposes. That call to the farmers was inevitable. We accepted it as the Government gave it to us, and our colleges worked strenuously, and the farmers did the same, with the results that we now all know. Now, it so happens that the farmers are coming to us and asking for help in their trouble. They do that because it has been their habit for years to come to the colleges, a growing habit, and they do it because they recall very plainly how active the college was in inducing many of them to upset good farming practice. We did not ask them to do it. We did not want them to upset good farming practice, but in the enthusiasm in answering that call for more food production many of them did upset good farming practices; a good many farmers broke up land that was in grass that should have stayed in grass, and it is going to take many, many years to get it back. You can not go out and sow a little grass seed and have a crop again next year. It is a matter of 20 years with many of the farmers to get back the grass for grazing purposes on land that they broke up to help increase production of cereals, especially wheat. You know so well the situation of the farmer that I will not dwell upon that. I just want to remind you of the fact, perhaps, to prove that we are in touch with the practical phases of this question and want to remind you of two or three things. Dean Mumford, who is on our committee, and who sits here, told me this morning about the sale of a farm section of land in a fine location in his State under the hammer the other day on the courthouse steps for $52 an acre, and that that land normally was worth $150 an acre. In one State half of the cases of bankruptcy are farm cases. That is unprecedented. There are many bankruptcy cases all over the country. The young men who are looking forward to useful and remunerative occupations in the colleges, are fighting shy of agriculture. That means a great deal for agricultural leadership. In the University of Illinois about four years ago they had a normal enrollment of agricultural students of 969. Last year it had fallen-other lines increasing, but not agriculture-to an enrollment of 748. In the State of Oregon, another splendid institution for agricultural education, the enrollment a few years ago was 708 and last year it was 582. Last fall they had a freshman enrollment of 151 less than the preceding year, a falling off of about 30 per cent, These young men are coming to the colleges, but they are going into other lines of work; they are not going into agriculture, and they ought to be in agriculture. We have a small enough proportion of college-trained men in agriculture now. Now, these people are coming to us and asking us to tell them how to get out of their trouble. We readily know that the problems of readjustment are not going to be solved rapidly. The farmer's turnover represents the equivalent of about one-fourth of his capital in a year. The merchant's turnover represents about five times his capital in a year. Somebody has said that if the farmers do complain and feel a grouch about the situation twenty times as long as the merchants, that they have a right to, because their turnover is that much slower than the turnover of the merchant. Now, the colleges must find answers to the farmers' questions. If we fail to find answers to these questions and to give them the truth, agriculture will suffer and our national life will suffer correspondingly. These questions that come to us are of three kinds: First, a great many relate to lower cost of production; second, many more relate to problems of marketing; third, a very large number of these questions relate to problems of the farm home, particularly in reference to saving in their buying, problems of economy, of labor, and so on. Now, some will say that we have made great progress in lowering the cost of production. In answer to that I would like to say that we have only begun. The losses suffered by farmers from causes which they can not understand, and therefore can not control, are simply colossal, and they have contributed very greatly to the present unfortunate situation. President Riggs, of the Agricultural College of South Carolina, who is in the city, but who is unfortunately confined to his bed to-day because of illness, calls attention to the loss last year of $150,000,000 worth of cotton on account of the ravages of the boll weevil. If we had had that extra cotton the price of cotton as a whole might have been affected slightly, but nothing near the loss that occurred through the depredations of this insect. The loss from contagious abortion alone runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and a considerable number of other similar subjects could be mentioned. The chief taxgatherers of our Nation to-day are insects. We talk about high taxes for roads and schools and for the Government. After those.taxes have been collected there is something left behind, whether we approve of it or not, it is there, something, after the tax is collected, to remind us of what we are paying it for. When the insects come along and take their tax, as they do annually to the extent of about $50,000,000, they leave absolutely nothing behind. I am told on good authority if it were not for the work that the experimental stations have done that this tax would be 50 per cent more, and I believe that is a conservative estimate. We think, Mr. Chairman, that of all the remedies that have been suggested for relieving the present agricultural situation, this bill introduced by Mr. Purnell, and known as H. R. 157, is the most desirable, because it is a bill that is so drawn that it will enable the States to find the kind of information we must have to answer these questions that are coming to us and which we now can not answer. We sometimes feel as if our hands were tied behind us. We have helped to get the farmers into their present situation; we were the agency of the government, the chief agency. They are coming to us now for help to get out, and we are not able to give it to them. I want to remind you that the farmers themselves wish this legislation. We are all heartily in favor of tax reduction; we believe that taxes are too high, but when one group of a thousand farmers will come together in a meeting and unanimously and enthusiastically support a measure of this kind and say they want this, even though it is at a little additional cost we must give attention to a call of that kind. The American Farm Bureau Federation, at its annual meeting in Chicago the other day, indorsed this measure by name. They realize the importance of more investigation. You know what happened at that meeting. The greatest farm organization that we have came together in Chicago and found themselves divided into two camps, favoring two radically different methods of proposed economical marketing for farm products; they are all honest men; they wanted to do the right thing, but they were so determined, with the light that they had on each side, that the other side was wrong, that they had more than a lively discussion on the subject. They finally settled it as best they could, not knowing whether they were right or not. This bill would permit a study of the system of standardizing the grading and marketing of farm products. Some one asks why don't you follow the example that has been so well settled by farm organizations in Europe. Well, some have tried to do that. They have tried to transplant bodily the whole works from Denmark to Iowa, or from Germany to New York, but while these things work splendidly in Europe under those conditions which exist there, we too often find that they do not work well in this country under our conditions; they are not adapted; they need to be adapted to our conditions. The principles are good, but it will require investigation and a great deal of it to apply them to the situation in this country. We know something about the financial situation that confronts Congress. I might say to you that we have just come from the White House, where the President was good enough to give us an extended interview by arrangement made by Secretary Wallace. We congratulated the President upon his forceful and splendid talk before the Government officers yesterday. It was a word such as the entire country has been waiting for. But you will notice in the message that the President did not express himself in an ironclad way against the great emergency. In fact, he specifically stated that there might a great emergency arise, and this morning by his attitude, his fine sympathy, and his own expressions it was very evident to us, Mr. Chairman, that he looked upon the present situation as a great emergency and upon this measure or one like it as something that was very well worthy of consideration. I will not attempt to quote the President. You have easier access to him than I. But I want to make it clear that we had a very encouraging interview with him, and he suggested to us that we should go on with the measure. Now, some one raises the point that the States ought to take care of their own affairs. I agree with that, but there are affairs that occur in the States that are more than of great importance to other States. |