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Show Farm Hot es Surplus Spuds Exports of potatoes under'the Department of Agriculture's program pro-gram to move stocks from the bumper 1946 crop arc past the 3 million bushel mark. Completed Com-pleted contracts under the export ex-port program cover 6 million bushels more, while contracts for another 2 million bushels are I being negotiated. I The Department will purchase at support prices an additional 6.5 million bushels of U. S. No. 1 grade potatoes from Maine and the North Central states for resale re-sale to the Army. These potatoes will be distributed in Germany for seed, and will permit potatoes po-tatoes now held in that country to be released for table stock. The Department also has made feeding by foreign governments, UNRRA, and the Army, at a token price of 4 cents per hundredweight, hun-dredweight, f.o.b. country shipping ship-ping point. Belguim, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain have ! purchased potatoes from the U. 1 S. under the export program. Many Farms in Low Income Bracket Only one out of every five U. 3. farms yielded $4000 worth of products in 1944, according to ncwly-relcased figures from the 3945 Farm Census. This is the minimum level of production necessary to return a net income between $2000 and $3000. Two-thirds Two-thirds of the Nation's farms averaged av-eraged only about $900 in gross value of output, the 1944 figures show. Although American farmers have what Bureau of Agricultural Agricul-tural Economics terms "the largest lar-gest private business in the world," over one-half of the total to-tal output in dollar value is concentrated con-centrated on one-tenth of the farms and the bottom one-third of the farms are limited to 4 per cent of the productive value. Low income farms are concentrated con-centrated in the Appalachian Highlands, the Ozarks, the cut-over cut-over areas of the Great Lakes States, in the Southeastern cotton cot-ton belt and in parts of New Mexico and Arizona. The West as a whole has one-third of its farms in the $4000-or-over class. Dairy Income Dairy farmers probably will receive less cash from dairy products in 1947 than in record-breaking record-breaking 1946, but the income will still be higher than for any year before 1946. The Bureau of Agricultural Economics, in making this forecast, says that) people arc spending less for I dairy products. Biggest declines in demand are expected to be for fluid milk, whole milk powder, and foreign-'type foreign-'type cheese produced in this country. Dairy exports in 1947 will fall below 1946 exports. Ownership Growing Farm tenancy is now at its lowest point in more than 50 years, BAE says. Noting a trend from farm renting rent-ing to farm owning, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics this month cautions that the test lies ahead when prices and in- j come go down. The number of foreclosure.? on farms at. thnt time will tell the tale. In 1945, tenants and croppers operated 32 per cent of all U. S. farms. This compares with a high of 42 per cent in the 1930's and nearly 39 per cent in 1939. Pasture Pays Three acres - of irrigated alfalfa alf-alfa is worth $900 to Joe Neely, irrigation farmer of McNary County, West Texas. Fencing off the small plot of alfalfa last spring. Neeley put nine bred gilts, four burrows and one boar on the irrigated pasture. Later he slaughtered 14 hogs for home use, sold a few for $350, and kept 25 pigs on the farm to be killed for fresh pork. Very little grain was fed the hogs. Canning Sugar No sugar especially earmarked earmark-ed for canning will be available for farm families to put up fruits and preserves this summer and fall, rationing officials have pointed out. The No. 11 ration stamp, which became valid April 1, will be good for 10 pounds, and later provisions will be made for increasing the ration for all users slightly above last year's level. About 3 1-3 million families, 13 million persons, are now being be-ing served by frozen-food locker plants in the United States. Plants increased from 4,600 in 1943 to 8,000 in 1946. Big game population in the 152 national forests today is more than four times what it was 25 years ago. Deer population popula-tion increased from 450,000 in 1921 to 1,992,000 in 1946, U. S. Forest Service says. |