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Show FARMERS' INCOMES ARE FAR TOO LOW Agriculture Department specialists special-ists suggest that as the armed forces are released in large numbers num-bers there will be plenty of farm help, especially in localities where the boom in war production fades away. But they aren't any too certain cer-tain that their wishes will come true. When we talk about agriculture we talk about food, and that has been a controversial subject across the counters of grocer and butcher in recent years. There has not been enough food produced on the farms because of manpower shortage, short-age, plus a lack of farm machinery and equipment. It's all right to send tens of thousands of "city fellers and girls" meaning, of course men and women out with their shovels, hoes and rakes into vacant lots to produce their own food. Nevertheless the demand for more progress in tilling the soil must be recognized, and met. According to the Census there are more than six million farms in the United States, but the proportion propor-tion of "low-income farmers" is astonishingly large and something must be done about it. The head of the Bureau of Economics Eco-nomics of Agriculture has predicted predict-ed that there will be about 500,000 more tractors on farms in five years than there are at the present time, and he correctly observes that mechanization of farms "has been responsible for most of the steady rise of the efficiency in the farm labor." |