during years when the weather conditions are favorable for rapid spread of the spores of this fungus, and sometimes it completely fires and ruins a whole field of sugar beets in the humid sections.

Mr. POAGE. Those years would be the wet years? Is that right? Mr. BRANDES. Yes; that disease is worse during wet years. In that case also considerable advance has been made in the sugar-beet breeding project in producing new strains or varieties of beets that are relatively resistant and satisfactory. There again we have no completely immune variety yet, and the work on attempting to produce immune beets is continuing.

Mr. POAGE. I have been informed, very recently, that you could not get any appreciable sugar content in beets unless you had very cold winters something like the peach tree, you can't grow peaches unless you have winters that are cold enough to make them set. If you get too far into the South you can't grow peaches, and I have understood that you can't grow sugar beets if you get too far South, but recently I have been told that the Missouri Pacific Railroad is introducing experiments down in my part of the country and claims they have had 21 percent sugar in their beets down in the Brazos Valley. That is in direct conflict with all I have been told before. What are the facts as to the climatic effect on the sugar content of beets?

Mr. BRANDES. It is quite true that the sugar beet is strictly a temperate zone plant, but it is grown quite far south by producing the crop at a different season of the year than is customarily done in the northern part of the country. In southern California, for example, the beets grow right through the winter and are harvested in May, June, and July.

Mr. POAGE. That is true only of regions where they do not have frost; is it not?

Mr. BRANDES. The plants will stand a certain amount of frost.
Mr. POAGE. But they will not stand freezing, will they?

Mr. BRANDES. They can be injured by severe freezes. However, what part of Texas is the Brazos Valley?

Mr. POAGE. The southeastern part.

Mr. BRANDES. I would think there is no reason to doubt that beets could be grown that far south, during the conventional season for growing beets, especially since it is an area with abundant sunshine. That is another requirement of sugar beets, and while it is humid, it is not a typically humid area.

Mr. POAGE. About 32 inches rainfall.

Mr. BRANDES. About 32 inches? However, 21 percent sucrose is quite high, and I suspect that was just an individual beet. It would hardly represent a fair sampling of a whole field, because that is almost the top analysis of sugar beets produced anywhere. We have analyses of individual beets up to 22 percent, but 15 percent is fair, 18 percent would be very good.

Mr. ANDRESEN. Have you determined whether or not these leaf spots on sugar beets come from too much moisture in the soil or from something that develops in the soil after several years of production of sugar beets? The reason I bring that up is that in my section of Minnesota for 75 or 80 years they raised the finest malting barley in the world, and all of a sudden they just couldn't get any more barely; fields that had been yielding 40 or 50 bushels to the acre had no barley at all, or very little. How do you figure that out?

Mr. BRANDES. It is quite true that when a disease is introduced, it usually causes very little damage at first, but as the crop is grown continuously, and especially if it is grown continuously on the same land, the organisms increase, and finally you have got almost to the saturation point. It happens that this particular disease, leaf spot, is one in which the fungus lives over the winter in the debris, the old leaves that are cut off when the plants are topped, and that forms the reservoir of spores which then are carried to the new plants when they come up the following year. So it is quite true that you get a progressive severity.

We find that in most cases of plant diseases the best way of attack is to produce new kinds of the crop plant which are resistant, in which case, if it is successful, you can simply forget about these sources of inoculation, because they don't enter the plant.

Mr. CLEVENGER. Dr. Brandes, would you mind touching on the disease that causes considerable losses to beet growers in the eastern Ohio area?

Mr. BRANDES. That is a disease which has become very much worse in recent years and goes under the name of "black root." Actually, black root is not associated with any single organism. The name results from a description of the symptoms on the plant. Perhaps three or four different organisms are involved, and they cause about the same symptons, which are a withering of the root, the taproot of the young seedling, very early in the season, and finally a collapse of the top, the leafy top of the seedling, which results in gaps in the row and a poor stand. Sometimes the stand is so poor that it is necessary to plow it up, and if it is not too late in the season, reseed and attempt to grow another crop in the expectation that there will not be a weather condition that would favor the development of the organisms in the second attempt.

Mr. CLEVENGER. Isn't it a fact that your funds for research have been reduced nearly $100,000 since 1939, making it impossible for you to complete your investigations and studies with regard to this disease? Congress has cut off the plant research appropriation, has it not, in the last 6 years?

Mr. BRANDES. It is true that, in common with other divisions of our Bureau, there has been a progressive cut in appropriations. I think it would be better to refer that question to Dr. McCall or Dr. Lambert.

Mr. CLEVENGER. The reason I asked that question is that these blackroot studies were being made in my district in Ohio, and they have ceased. In the last 5 or 6 years there has been almost no progress made in that field. I don't know why it is, and I wondered if it was due to lack of funds.

Mr. BRANDES. Well, our limitations on the work that we conduct are pretty largely due to limitations of funds; yes, sir.

Mr. CLEVENGER. I have some figures here from Michigan showing 60.000 acres of sugar beets planted in 1943, 11,000 acres abandoned, due to this disease. In 1944, out of 69,000 acres planted, some 9,800 acres were abandoned. Does that sound reasonable?

Mr. BRANDES. That sounds rather typical.

Mr. CLEVENGER. And in Ohio, in 1944, 17,000 acres were planted, 4,800 acres abandoned.

In Michigan in 1943 there were 5,000 acres abandoned due to black root; in 1944, 4,800 acres abandoned. In Ohio in 1944, 900 acres were abandoned due to black root.

Mr. PHILLIPS. Is any of that due to the disease known as the O.P.A.?
Mr. CLEVENGER. No; that is another parasite.

Mr. BRANDES. We fortunately have a policy on sugar now which is to grow all that it is possible to grow.

Mr. ANDRESEN. That is only a new policy, because up until 1943 there was a restriction on the amount of sugar beets that could be grown in this country.

Mr. BRANDES. Yes, sir; and if they did not comply with the restrictions they did not receive the benefits.

Mr. ANDRESEN. And I don't know what the policy is going to be for the future, but the war is over now, and it may be the policy that we are to be "good neighbor" and let other people in other countries grow our sugar beets. Do you think that would be any reason for the curtailment of appropriations for investigation?"

Mr. BRANDES. I can't answer that question, sir.

Mr. CLEVENGET. I am doubly interested because last week Dr. Townsend, former Governor of Indiana, was up in my town speaking, and he warned the people, and there was something rather ominus in his warnings, that they must quit growing so much corn. He waved the old story that if we raise over 3,000,000,000 bushels of corn-which I don't think we have done for more than 3 years-we will have to face 30-cent corn and 3-cent hogs again, and our people are interested in getting back some of these acres into sugar beets. There are 14 counties in northwestern Ohio that raise them, and we have 2 sugar factories in that area running a short season this year, one of them at Decatur and Mr. Gillie's district, and the other at Blissfield, Mich., not running at all. I don't know whether Ottawa, in my district, has really opened yet, but at Fremont and Findlay they are running a short season. We are interested in saving this crop. We can diversify and let somebody else raise corn if we can get back to the production of sugar. We will let the Indiana people and the Illinois people and the Iowa people

grow more corn.

Mr. GRANGER. I hope you gentlemen will feel absolutely free in discussing this matter of appropriations or any restrictions that have been placed on the Department, because I am sure you are now with friends in that matter. We all know that in the field of research it is off in a little corner by itself and it isn't advertised very much, and it's an easy thing to cut that appropriation, and we would like to know, not wholly on sugar beets but research in all agriculture fields, whether or not appropriations have been adequate to do the job, and we want you to have an open discussion of that.

Mr. BRANDES. Well, I would like to make a rather general statement, which I believe will, in part, answer Mr. Andresen's question, and that is that with the progress that has been made as the result of research, including the research of the Department of Agriculture, I feel that we can, from a technical standpoint, grow either sugar beets or sugar cane in the continental United States as efficiently as it can be grown anywhere, that is, on a basis of actual output of manpower per pound of sugar. There has been a great deal of misconception of the advantages enjoyed by certain other countries, particularly tropical countries, in the production of sugar, but the

advantages they enjoy are of an entirely different character than the actual efficiency and technical excellence of sugar production.

Mr. ANDRESEN. By that you mean that we are mechanizing so as to do away with hand labor for one thing?

Mr. BRANDES. Well, I am summing up a great many things. Louisiana produces in 912 months more sugarcane per acre than Cuba does.

Mr. ANDRESEN. I am sure the acreage in Louisiana, and also in northern Florida, was cut on growing sugar a year ago—at least, they were not eligible for benefit payments if they produced more than their allotted acreage.

Mr. BRANDES. In the case of Florida, the production of sugarcane per acre is considerably more than in Cuba. I am speaking of the grand average of the whole State of Florida and the whole island of Cuba.

Mr. ANDRESEN. We had this Mr. Bitting, I think is the name, before our committee some years ago, and he said he was not interested in the tariff on sugar because he could compete any time with the sugar grown in Cuba and the tropical countries. Of course, in the sugar-beet area we have found this, that with the labor that has to be employed in the production of sugar beets we could not produce very many acres of sugar beets in competition with the other countries unless we did have some kind of protection, and when the reciprocal trade program went forward and the duty on sugar from other countries that produced it was reduced, some other means had to be found to encourage sugar-beet production in this country, and benefit payments were provided so we could get some sugar production in the United States. Of course our sugar situation in this country and the world is very different at the present time, but we can generally trace the shortage to the fallacy of the policy of curtailed production in this country, when we need the sugar, particularly during wartime.

So I for one am interested, just as Mr. Clevenger suggested here, that we divert some of our acreage from producing corn and wheat and such crops into such deficiency crops as sugar, if we can just get enough, not to take care of our people but at least have an ever normal granary here that will take care of our needs when we don't get enough from other countries. Of course, I also believe in protection.

Mr. BRANDES. I suspect that Mr. Bitting may have had reason to change his mind, because even in Florida the costs are quite high, that is, the wages of labor are quite high.

Mr. ANDRESEN. That is Government policy, isn't it? Of course, I don't want to put you on the spot here.

Mr. BRANDES. The need for protection at the present time is not. because of any inefficiency or any deficiency of technical skills of our farmers in producing sugar beets or sugarcane. They do a splendid job. They can produce a bag of sugar with a minimum of labor or minimum of hours of labor.

Mr. ANDRESEN. In the first place we have got to produce the beets or the cane. Now we have thousands of acres of sugar beets that are going to freeze on us up in Minnesota because of the inability to get labor to harvest those beets. These people coming back from the war plants, and possibly some coming out of the Army, could go out and help harvest those beets, and also harvest some of the potatoes

that are going to freeze, but it doesn't seem as though they are inclined into that type of work, and therefore they demand right today for us to get foreign labor to harvest not only the sugar-beet crop and the potato crop and the citrus crop, but also to continue that program for 1946. It is said that we are going to have from 8 to 15 million people unemployed here in the United States next year, and therefore there comes up the question of this foreign labor, and that all enters into the picture with the cost of producing sugar, or sugar

beets.

Mr. CLEVENGER. I want to add to the record some papers on this matter of labor.

(The papers referred to follow :)

STATEMENT BY H. A. THOMAS, JR., ACTING CHAIRMAN, REPRESENTING AN AGRICUL TURAL LABOR CONFERENCE OF FARMERS AND FARM ORGANIZATION REPRESENTATIVES FROM THE MAJOR AGRICULTURAL PRODUCING STATES OF THE NATION BEING HELD HERE IN WASHINGTON, D. C.

WASHINGTON, D. C., October 26, 1945.

Hon. CLARENCE CANNON,

Chairman, Subcommittee on Deficiency Appropriations,
House Committee on Appropriations, Washington, D. C.

DEAR MR. CHAIRMAN: Agriculture finds after careful investigation of the facts that the supply of domestic agricultural labor for 1946 will fall far short of the need to equal the production of food and fiber of 1944 or 1945, and that a serious reduction of acreage will result unless farmers are assured in advance of the time to plant an adequate supply of workers.

The terms of House Document 342 which include the recommendations of the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of the Budget for the extension of the farm labor supply program have been made known to our conference only within the last 3 days. Obviously, at the time of our first appearance before your committee we had no time to make a careful analysis of these terms.

At present, two features of the document give some considerable concern. The first of these is a blanket authorization to the Secretary of Agriculture to make a service charge upon the users of transported labor. If this charge were nominal or reasonable, it is readily apparent that no considerable sum would be added to the funds appropriated because of the great administrative difficulty in the collection of charges from thousands of employers and the expense of payroll audits involving many thousands of workers. On the other hand, if the charge were high enough to be a real contribution to the funds, the monetary penalty imposed on the users of this type of labor, in addition to those already present by the terms of international agreements and the present contracts with the Office of Labor, would, to a very practical certainty, preclude the use of this transported labor and cause an immediate shift in crop planning. This shift could be nothing but detrimental to the food supply and would seriously upset the attainment of crop goals determined to be necessary to the national welfare. The second feature of these recommendations concerning which we are alarmed is the amount of the fund requested. In the light of our present knowledge and our considered opinion of the foreseeable future, the sum of $8,000,000 which will be left to the Office of Labor of the Department of Agriculture after the allocations made to the various States for farm labor offices will not be adequate to fill the minimum need and will require hurried future action to augment this amount when the emergency is at hand and the Nation is faced with certain disastrous crop losses. It is difficult to exactly anticipate needs under present conditions, and we believe it would be better in this instance to be absolutely safe as all funds not used would be subsequently returned to the Treasury.

Agriculture pledges itself to make all possible use of and give first consideration to the employment of all returning members of the armed forces, unemployed war plant workers, local domestic workers, or workers from any other source available and qualified to do the job before requesting or using workers imported from outside the United States.

Respectfully submitted,

H. A. THOMAS, Jr.