of economic power. I have not even attempted to review the information that has been brought out in the tobacco, meat packing, and farm machinery antitrust suits.

A complete study of the problem would really involve analyzing the entire economic system. However, I believe that we can agree upon those economic areas which seem to be most concentrated and therefore in need of first and greatest attention.

The problems of a postwar situation make it doubly important to proceed rapidly with both study and action that proves to be necessary. The welfare of the farm family, and equally the general welfare, require an expanding economy. This in turn requires free competition and opportunity for individual initiative, which are inevitably stifled whenever and wherever economic power becomes abusively concentrated. The Department of Agrculture stands ready to cooperate with you to the fullest extent possible in discovering the full relation of monopoly power to agriculture. The farmer as both a buyer and a seller is concerned with the concentrated economic forces that he meets "coming and going."

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any questions, gentlemen?

Mr. KEATING. I have or three questions.

With reference to your statement preceding your definite statement of the areas of economy requiring study, Mr. Secretary, at the top of page 13, would it be fair to summarize your testimony by saying that your feeling is that with reference to farm economy, it is an economy where you should fight fire with fire; in other words, that the farmer must face the concentration of economic power among others by a policy of agreements and price supports, in an effort to concentrate economic power in himself and in the agricultural economy?

Secretary BRANNAN. No, Mr. Keating, I do not think that would be my point of view, nor the intention of the statement.

As you are aware, I was invited to express to you the general relationship between the studies of the committee and the agricultural areas, and I have pointed out that the farm price-support mechanisms were developed because the farmer was at a disadvantage in the market place, particularly when he sold his commodity. He does not have, first of all, an opportunity to fix his own price for his major commodities the day he plants them, or during the time he takes care of them, and even as he goes on his way to market, he frequently does not know what price he is going to get for his commodities.

Whether we like it or not, that is a fact in our economy, and I think the Congress has recognized, and I think very properly recognized, the need for whatever protective devices are required to see that he is not destroyed by that situation.

Mr. KEATING. Well, regardless of the merit of the price-support program or the merit of one form of program as against another, it is a fact, is it not, that any farm price-support program results in the establishment of uniform prices, pretty much so?

Secretary BRANNAN. No, sir. The farm-support program is designed to make it possible, as I understand it, for farmers to secure at least a reasonable return for the commodities he produces as he takes them to the market place. He may get more than that.

Mr. KEATING. He may; that is true.

Secretary BRANNAN. He may get less than that, if he does not want to take advantage of the price-support programs.

Mr. KEATING. But the range of price as to a commodity would be much greater, would it not, in a free market than it would in a pricesupported market?

Secretary BRANNAN. It would be on the low side, sure. I do not think a free market would allow prices to go up any more; at least, the price-support system that we have today does not influence the top prices or control them in any way. It does try to prevent the return to the farmer from going to ruinous levels.

Mr. KEATING. When you raise the bottom prices, you raise it, perhaps not to the same extent, but you raise somewhat the top prices; do you not?

Secretary BRANNAN. I would not think so, sincerely, Mr. Keating. The CHAIRMAN. May I ask a question at this point?

Mr. KEATING. Surely.

The CHAIRMAN. Would you say, Mr. Secretary, that the farmer operates upon a purely individual basis, and on the farm, that is the only place where we have pure competition, whereas in the processing and distribution and transportation of the farm product, you no longer have the keenest kind of competition, you do not have pure competition, but you have combinations and restraints of all sorts which are pressing in on the farmer?

Is that a correct statement?

Secretary BRANNAN. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I would agree with that, and I think the explanation lies in the fact that farmers, as producers, number over 32 to 42 million units, or 4 million productive units, whereas most of the other items you mentioned are concentrated into units of, perhaps, 100, 200, or 300. In short, you cannot get 3,000,000 individual producers together in any kind of combination or agreement like you can just as you have here, just a very fow people. That is just inherent in the numbers of them.

The CHAIRMAN. Therefore, it is incumbent-is it not?-upon the Government to offer a shield to the farmer against this tremendous pressure bearing in on him by monopolies, and the "oligopolies,” and the other concentrations in the distributive field, in the transportation field, in the processing field.

Secretary BRANNAN. I believe so, Mr. Chairman, for the very basic reason that everybody has a fundamental national interest or an individual interest in seeing that our productive resources, the land, are taken care of well. Unless the farmer can get a reasonable return for the things he produces, necessarily those resources will be depleted, and we will cease to be as strong a Nation as we otherwise would be.

The CHAIRMAN. Now, I would like to ask you-I do not know whether you have the figures before you-but how much does the farmer receive out of the consumer dollar today?

Secretary BRANNAN. I do not have that, Mr. Chairman, and you could only supply it really by commodities to be fairly informative.

He gets a very small part of the consumer dollar which is spent for bread; he gets a rather large percentage of the consumer dollar that is spent for meat. I think we have tried to strike an average at one time or another, but it does vary, and I would be very happy to put those figures into the record for you if you wish.

The CHAIRMAN. I would be very happy to have that. (The information referred to follows:)

Farmer's share of the consumer's dollar spent for specified farm products (United States average, 1948)

Farmer's share of the consumer's dollar spent for farm food products in the family market basket, 1935-39 average, annual 1940-48, and May 1949

The CHAIRMAN. Would you say that the farmer does not get a sufficient portion of that dollar, the consumer dollar, and that he should receive more?

Secretary BRANNAN. Mr. Chairman, I am not prepared to state that as a categorical fact. In some commodities he does get a fair proportion of it. In other commodities there is some reason to believe that he does not. Averages in matters of this kind are just a little bit dangerous, and I would rather not try to draw a conclusion on his

average income, because in it you have everything from watermelons to artichokes, on one end, to the basics of wheat, cotton, meat and so forth, on the other.

The CHAIRMAN. In the TNEC study in 1940, I find the following:

Recent studies of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics show that in 1940 farmers got an income of approximately 6.2 billion dollars for producing goods bought by American consumers.

This left out nonfoods and exports.

The consumer spent 14.8 billion dollars for these foods. The difference, amounting to 8.6 billion dollars, went to railroads, truckers, processors and manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, bankers and other kinds of middlemen. On the average, the farmer got 42 cents of the consumers' food dollar, and the marketing system got the other 58 cents.

I thought it might be interesting to put that into the record, and if possible, if you care to, you might give us some up-to-date figures and, possibly, break it down in accordance with particular commodities.

Mr. KEATING. Of course, in that connection, it should be borne in mind that in this process are hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people employed who also shared in that.

Mr. MICHENER. Yes.

The farmer gets the money he receives for his product in the market place, and in addition to that he gets the benefits, the checks for doing a better job, such as in soil conservation.

Now, in determining what part of the consumer dollar the farmer gets, do your figures take into consideration the checks the farmer has had from the Government?

Secretary BRANNAN. No, Mr. Congressman, I do not think they are computed, and I do not think they should be computed because, after all, it is the farmer himself who has contributed to that tax money which is invested in the improvement of his soil resources.

Mr. KEATING. The farmer, among others.

Secretary BRANNAN. Among others, certainly; yes.

Mr. MICHENER. Some of it comes out of general tax money. Secretary BRANNAN. He is a big taxpayer in this country, too. Mr. MICHENER. Of course he is. That is just what I am getting at. If you are getting into figures, just saying now, here, this farmer gets so much out of every bushel of potatoes he sells, and the consumer pays so much for the potatoes, now where does the difference in there come from?

Secretary BRANNAN. From the tax funds.

Mr. MICHENER. That is it exactly, and the farmer only shares in proportion to the amount of taxes he pays.

Secretary BRANNAN. That is right, sir. I am sure the Congressman does not associate me with that particular type of law, pricesupport law, because, as you know, I have been opposing it vigorously for a long time.

Mr. MICHENER. Yes; I think that is true, since you have been in power, but I am viewing the whole situation, especially that which existed at the time the TNEC report came out, to which the chairman referred.

Suppose I had a farm-I am talking about only the last 2 years-I have a farm now: If I agreed to go along and do the things that your

Department tells me to do, then I receive the regular price in the market place, whatever that is, plus the check which I receive from the Government for doing the thing that would help my business. That is correct; is it not?

Secretary BRANNAN. That is correct but, Mr. Congressman, may I point out the total amount appropriated in any year, or the maximum amount appropriated in any year has been $300,000,000, and just draw the relationship between $300,000,000, on the one hand, and the farm income of 32 billions of dollars in 1948, and you can see that the amount he got in conservation-practice payments was an extremely small fraction of his income. It was certainly no part of his income that would have made the difference between living or nonliving, or profit or loss, or anything else.

Mr. MICHENER. No; the question of marketing, the question of demand, the question of exports, the question of what we sent abroad all enter into it.

Secretary BRANNAN. I do not quite understand the implication in the statement, sir.

Mr. MICHENER. What I mean is that the demand in the market cuts a big figure with what the farmer's income is; and if the demand is artificial, or if the demand is unusual, or the demand is an emergency demand, that can hardly be considered as the income of the farmer in ordinary times.

Secretary BRANNAN. No; I think that is right, Mr. Michener.

As a matter of fact, over the last 10 years, 1939 to 1948, the national farm income has ranged from about 912 billions of dollars to the 31.2 billions of dollars that I mentioned a moment ago.

Mr. MICHENER. That is all.

Mr. KEATING. Well, Mr. Secretary, do I understand that the payments by the Government to farmers last year amounted to about $300,000,000?

Secretary BRANNAN. $265,000,000 last year.

Mr. KEATING. And you do not associate yourself with the plan under which those payments were made?

Secretary BRANNAN. Oh, yes, I do, sir. I was making the point that I do not associate myself with the price-support device now being used in the case of potatoes, to which Mr. Michener made reference.

We, in the Department of Agriculture, have written letters in 1947, 1948, and 1949, and testified several times that we thought that was not a good application of the price-support theory.

Mr. KEATING. Is not that price-support program a part of the method by which these payments were made to the farmers?

Secretary BRANNAN. That is correct, sir; but we maintained, and I think almost everybody in the field maintains, that it is subject to some improvement, and that was one of the areas in which we thought there was room for improvement.

Mr. KEATING. You have proposed a specific plan to change that; have you not?

Secretary BRANNAN. I have, sir.

Mr. KEATING. Under your plan, what is it anticipated will be paid to the farmers in checks each year?

Secretary BRANNAN. Of course, as you are well aware, that is one of the controversial subjects, but let us take the question of potatoes.