Mr. WILLIS. When I voted for that cotton control I voted with the idea that I would have a reduction in acreage to bring it down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000,000 acres. If they had followed everybody's crop the same as they did my own, and other crops that I know of in my vicinity, we would not have 12,000,000 acres. Mr. PACE. Bring what down to 20,000,000?

Mr. WILLIS. The total acreage, the national allotment. If they bring it down, like they did myself and other farmers in my community, we will not have 12,000,000 acres of cotton in the United States. Mr. SUTTON. Mr. Willis, did you not vote for that reduction?

Mr. ABERNETHY. The law clearly states that you shall have your allotment in your hands before you vote.

Mr. WILLIS. And the Secretary of Agriculture wrote and said we could have 5 acres, but we have not gotten it.

Mr. GATHINGS. You were cut 75 percent.

Mr. WILLIS. My cotton was reduced 75 percent.

Mr. GATHINGS. By virtue of the county factor, you had in your county?

Mr. WILLIS. That is right.

Mr. GATHINGS. And you are here complaining that as a matter of fact it ought to be put on a history basis because you had been growing 20 acres of cotton, is that true?

Mr. WILLIS. I am here complaining that all cotton growers should have a reduction in their acreage and when you go down and bother this little 4- and 5-, or 15- and 20-acre farmer, you are taking his bread and butter away from him. Cotton means bread and butter to us. You can reduce a man who has 1,000 acres to 250 acres and you are not going to hurt him as badly as you will hurt me by reducing me from 20 acres down to 5. I have two tenants on my farm. Those two tenants have got to split 5 acres of cotton. That is what I am talking about.

Mr. PACE. Thank you very much, Mr. Willis.

Mr. GATHINGS. Did you get to the main part of your testimony, Mr. Willis?

Mr. WILLIS. No.

Mr. GATHINGS. Can you brief it down? You have another minute or two, I believe. Let us get to the milk in the coconut.

Mr. WILLIS. What I wanted to suggest to you gentlemen was that this acreage be distributed on the income tax, based on the income tax system. If a man makes lots of money he pays lots of income The man who just makes a living does not pay any. Let us do the same way with acreage. This man with five or six thousand acres of cotton, let him reduce a greater percent than the little man.

tax.

Mr. GATHINGS. You just got through saying that two of your tenants were going to have to share 10 acres of cotton.

Mr. WILLIS. That is correct. I am saying if you had taken 50 acres away from a 100-acre cotton man instead of 15 acres away from a 20-acre cotton man it would have been more equitable. They could both have lived.

Mr. PACE. I thought you said the trouble was that they were taking it away from the little man.

Mr. WILLIS. That is what I am saying. They are taking a bigger percentage away from the little man than they are the big man.

They took 75 percent of my cotton acreage and there is not a cotton planter in this country with 1,000 acres that was cut down to 250. I was cut from 20 to 5. Show me a man with 1,000 acres who was cut down to 250.

Mr. PACE. You are not using 1949 plantings in your mind, are you? Mr. WILLIS. I am using what I got.

Mr. PACE. You are not using 1949, are you?

Mr. WILLIS. The 1949 acreage?

Mr. PACE. Yes.

Mr. WILLIS. Yes, sir. I am using the 1948 acreage, also.

Mr. PACE. You cannot use 1949.

Mr. WILLIS. The 1949 planter was not allowed to vote. I voted. I was in cotton in 1948 and before that.

Mr. PACE. I know, Mr. Willis, but you come up here with some misunderstanding, it appears to me. Congress has said that you cannot take into account 1949 under any circumstances.

Mr. WILLIS. I am not. I am taking my 1948 acreage.

Mr. PACE. The figures show that your county had in 1948 13,800 acres of cotton.

Mr. WILLIS. Yes, sir.

Mr. PACE. And that you got an allotment of 12,746 acres.

Mr. WILLIS. Yes, sir; and that allotment was contributed to one farmer who has had no cotton for 10 years, for example. He has a 70-acre allotment. Another farmer has not had cotton for years and he has 50 acres. Here the cotton farmer who has been raising a little patch does not have any.

Mr. PACE. We have provided a system whereby that man can surrender that back to you.

Mr. WILLIS. We cannot go to court to get that 5 acres of cotton because it costs 5 acres of cotton to go through court.

Mr. PACE. Thank you very much.

Mr. POAGE. Do you agree with the gentleman from Madison County, Fla., who just preceded you who said we should cut everybody's allotment?

Mr. WILLIS. No, sir. I do not think you should cut the 5-acre man a bit.

Mr. POAGE. Then you think the law should be left as it is on that respect?

Mr. WILLIS. Yes, sir; and let the Department, or whoever is in charge of prorating out this acreage, do that. My idea is if you will say Cherokee County is entitled to 13,000 acres, you can leave that up to our county committee to say who is going to get that. If I do not want to plant cotton, do not give me acreage. That is where our trouble is. We have been distributing this acreage out promiscuously. Mr. POAGE. We agree with you on that.

Mr. WILLIS. I think each farmer should go down to the triple a office and say, "I want to plant so many acres of cotton this year." All right, if there is enough cotton that I can have what I want, let it go. Mr. PACE. I am sorry, gentlemen, but we have no more time. Mr. SUTTON. Mr. Chairman, I would like to have one thing for the record, the man's name who was cut down to 0.6 of an acre whom this gentleman spoke of so it can be turned over to the Department.

Mr. PACE. I would like to have it investigated, too. Who is that man?

Mr. WILLIS. Chester Vining.

Mr. PACE. What is his address?

Mr. WILLIS. Rusk, Tex.

Mr. ABERNETHY. The PMA officer I just talked to in this room says if that is correct they will have that changed.

Mr. WILLIS. Sure it is correct. He raises an average of 7 to 8 acres of cotton and has done it for years and years. Now he has 0.6 of an acre.

Mr. POAGE. Mr. Chairman, may I ask that we call this PMA man that Mr. Abernethy has just talked to and find out how it was done? Mr. Bell is the man, I believe. How was it done, Mr. Bell?

Mr. BELL. If the condition exists which the gentleman describes, there has obviously been an error made.

Mr. POAGE. Do you mean that it is not done according to law?
Mr. BELL. That is right.

Mr. POAGE. Then it is the fault of the Administration somewhere and not the fault of the law.

Mr. BELL. I would not say exactly the fault of the Administration. I think everybody makes an error occasionally.

Mr. POAGE. I am not trying to say the fault of the Department of Agriculture. What I want to make plain is, could you correct that error that he is talking about by changing the law?

Mr. BELL. It should be noted that the county offices are now making what they call their corrected supplements. They have found some errors and they are working on those right now.

Mr. POAGE. I understand that. I understand there will be some errors, but just let us get this plain. Could you correct the error that he described by changing the law?

Mr. BELL. I think there is adequate acreage in the county to correct it.

Mr. POAGE. Mr. Bell, I did not ask you a thing about the acreage in the county. Will you answer me or will you not? Could you correct the error he has described here by changing the law?

Mr. PACE. In other words, the law is adequate, is it not?
Mr. BELL. I believe the law is adequate, Mr. Pace.

Mr. PACE. Thank you very much.

Gentlemen, I will call you all to the stand together, the group of gentlemen from the district served by our distinguished colleague, Mr. Worley. Mr. Traweek, will you come around and have a chair with Mr. Sherley, Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Hartzog, and Mr. Carpenter. Gentlemen, we will put you all on the stand at one time. Do you desire to make one short statement or will one of you make a general statement with the others following with amplifying remarks? Mr. WORLEY. Mr. Chairman, if there is no objection, we would like Mr. Hartzog to lead off.

Mr. PACE. All right, Mr. Hartzog, you may proceed. If you have a written statement, you can file it with the clerk and make your statement orally.

STATEMENTS OF A. L. HARTZOG, WILLIAM SHERLEY, CURTIS TRAWEEK, POSEY CUNNINGHAM, AND HAROLD CARPENTER, TEXAS COTTON GROWERS

Mr. HARTZOG. We have filed a statement from our county with the clerk. We have copies placed in the hands of each of you gentlemen. (The statement referred to is as follows:)

WASHINGTON, D. C., March 8, 1950.

The Parmer County, Tex., Cotton Committee respectfully recommends: (1) That every cotton-growing county which received less than 10,000 acres under the present legislation as administered, be guaranteed a minimum of 60 percent of its 1942 cotton acreage allotment, but not to exceed 15,000 acres.

(2) That any unplanted acreage voluntarily returned by a grower to a county PMA committee be reallocated to growers who produced in the year 1949 for the first time, and to others in the county making new grower application.

A. L. HARTZOG, Chairman.
W. M. SHERLEY, Member.
HAROLD CARPENTER, Member.

Mr. HARTZOG. Gentlemen, we are not up here to let you pick us to pieces about individual cases. You have heard thousands of them. We are not here to try to give you much information about what can be done. You know it much better than we do.

We have a little problem which we would like to state simply and get to the point.

We favor farm price legislation as it is. We feel that it suits us best to continue to use plans supporting the price of cotton as a basic storable commodity that has been tried and proven and about which there is not much consumer kick. We are willing for a trial run of the Brannan plan on potatoes. So much for price supports. Do I make myself clear?

I believe the records of you gentlemen prove you are in agreement with me. The farmers who sent us up here feel that way about it. We had a meeting and they voted unanimously in that regard. We are thinking in terms of large acreages of cotton being planted around us. We would like to point out that our county, Parmer County, Tex., in 1942, sent its quota of young men to war. They fought the war and came home and found that if they finally were able to buy a farm and wanted to plant a little cotton in there, our cotton acreage was gone. We had 24,000-plus acres of cotton allotment in 1942. This past year our cotton-acreage allotment was 5,008 acres. We feel that that is a big drop for a boy who sacrificed a good deal. We admit that there are a lot of landowners and operators involved in the thing who did not go to war. I am not a veteran, so I am not speaking personally. I have no selfish interest in it.

I think you will see that is an unselfish attitude.

Mr. PACE. No cotton farmer who went to war lost his allotments, Mr. Hartzog.

Mr. HARTZOG. Let us see if they did. The war credit clause was supposed to take care of it. In our county we had one big farmer with 2,022 acres of cropland and adjusted cropland of 1,575 acres. Highest crop acreage based on war crop credits, 189 acres; his mandatory cotton allotment, 172.5 acres.

Gentlemen, you fixed a law where that would take care of him. Our county took care of him, but he does not want to plant his acre

age. He has not grown any cotton during the base years. But we have some veterans in that county who contributed to the history of an adjoining county. They planted cotton in 1947 and 1948 and moved to our county, which was a new area. They bought farms and planted cotton last year, which we have to disregard, obviously. Mr. WORLEY. What was the adjoining county acreage, for the record?

Mr. HARTZOG. Bailey County.

Mr. ABERNETHY. Did they own the land on which they planted the cotton in the adjoining county?

Mr. HARTZOG. This boy's father owned the land. The boy went The boy's father is aged. The boy had to move.

to war.

Mr. ABERNETHY. Do you think the boy's father should be given an allotment, too?

Mr. HARTZOG. This boy moved to another county, you understand, and bought land himself.

Mr. ABERNETHY. He planted the cotton on his father's farm and his father's farm got the history. Then the boy moved to another county. Do think that the allotment should be taken from his father and given to the boy or that both of them should be given comparable allotments?

you

Mr. HARTZOG. I represent Parmer County.

Mr. ABERNETHY. I am trying to find out who you think should get the allotment in such cases.

Mr. HARTZOG. I think perhaps-just perhaps that Congress could work out a little plan to let some of that acreage go with that boy. I understand that each rice grower carries some acreage with him. Is that right or wrong?

Mr. GATHINGS. Not at this time.

Mr. HARTZOG. We thought perhaps that might be true.

Mr. PACE. Let us wait right there.

Mr. ABERNETHY. In other words, the tenant would carry some of the acreage with him when he moved to another place?

Mr. HARTZOG. I would not object to that in the least.

Mr. PACE. You think a man ought to be able to walk up and down

a public road with a cotton allotment in his pocket?

Mr. HARTZOG. It may be a bad plan if the rice growers gave it up. I would not know. You men know more about that than I do. Mr. POAGE. What would it do to your land values?

Mr. HARTZOG. I do not know.

We are losing all our cotton allotment. We had 24,000 acres and we have now 5,000 acres.

Mr. POAGE. What would it do to the stability of land prices all over the plains of Texas if you let a man bid for a farm on the basis of how much cotton allotment he had in his pocket?

Mr. HARTZOG. Mr. Poage, we have 20 percent of the cotton now that we had then. That has not helped our land value.

Mr. POAGE. You have more than that.

Mr. PACE. The record shows that in 1941 Parmer County had 12,300 acres in cotton.

Mr. HARTZOG. 1942.

Mr. PACE. No; in 1941 you had 12,300 acres. You did not have as much in 1942 as you had in 1941. Where did you get this twenty or twenty-five thousand figure?