not be necessary for them to meet that often and drive over the county, and those men know the county, and they know the land, and they know the farmers in the county. Half of them know the minute you mention a man's name whether he would do or would not do. In 1 day they can narrow the number of farmers eligible down to a half a dozen farmers, and in 1 day they can narrow the number of farms down to half a dozen farms. Of course, you could string this out indefinitely for a month, or at the most 2 months. I cannot see how you would use over $90 on these men, but here you are using $400. That is terrible. It is not going to take a year to select these men and farms.

Mr. PERKINS. It is very possible that when we get into this program we shall find that we can operate in more than 500 counties, and if we can, it is of course a desirable thing to do. However, there will be legal and procedural matters to settle before we can get the program under way.

MODUS OPERANDI

Mr. CANNON. All that this county committee does is to select the men and the farm. Your county agent confers with the committee all along, but he is acting ex-officio and he receives no additional compensation. Who is going to pass on the title to this farm or make the actual transfer? Who is going to examine the abstract? Are you going to condemn this farm as you do in buying other Government land? Of course, I do not believe you would do that. Or, are you going to leave that to the man who buys the farm? I should think that would be a very reasonable way to handle it. This man has bought this farm. It is his investment, and he is putting a mortgage on it. Now, it seems to me it is up to the farmer to satisfy himself as to the soundness of the title and the validity of the transfer. Mr. PERKINS. I can only talk rather tentatively about that. Mr. CANNON. Would the Government itself have any interest at all in the title? Of course, they have a first lien on it, a first mortgage on it, and would probably have to have somebody pass on the abstract after the farmer was ready to buy it, but that would be a fee service, I take it. Could that be handled by the men who are engaged in similar service in the purchase of other Government land? Mr. PERKINS. I am unable, of course, to commit the Department to any such policy at this time, but I can say this, that the policy followed by the Federal land banks, while it might not be completely applicable here, seems to be a very simple and sensible one. Before the Government lends its money there should be an adequate review of the title.

Mr. CANNON. Could not that be made by the Federal land bank without any additional expense?

Mr. PERKINS. No.

Mr. CANNON. If you had a half a dozen farms in some county, and one in each of a half a dozen counties your cost of abstracts of title would be no more if you distributed them one in each county than if you had a half a dozen in one county?

Mr. PERKINS. That is true.

Mr. CANNON. The only thing on which you base your determination to locate a half a dozen farms in one county, completely ignoring adjacent counties is the cost of these three men, a maximum of 5.

days a month, at $3 per day, on which you figure it would take $45 to select a man and farm, and it seems to me that is not justified by the actual figures.

Mr. PERKINS. It is perfectly possible that when we get into the program we can operate in a few more than 500 counties, but more is involved than having to look at a few farms and then deciding to make loans upon them. There is the matter of instructing the various committees in the forms which they have to use so that the Comptroller General will approve the expenditure of the money.

Mr. CANNON. How many days would it take to instruct them? These are three practical farmers, and they know the farmers, and they know the land in that county. They are old, experienced, practical men. How long is it going to take you to instruct them? Could you instruct them in 1 day?

Mr. PERKINS. I think the most economical thing to do would be to have them come to a State meeting.

Mr. CANNON. Would you have them come there and stay 1 day? Mr. PERKINS. Yes; a day or so.

Mr. CANNON. That would be $9 a day or $18 for 2 days' instruction.

PROCEDURAL DIFFICULTIES CONFRONTING COUNTY COMMITTEES

Mr. WOODRUM. Mr. Perkins, I think at the time of the recess you were about to start some observations or further explanation on this item that we were discussing, and you may proceed, if you please. Mr. PERKINS. I would like to try, if I can, to answer your question, more definitely Mr. Cannon, because this is a very difficult problem. In our estimate, indicating that it would take $212,000 for these county committees, we have frankly no notion, and cannot have, of the problems which these committees are going to face. We have talked with farmers out in the country about it; they have read the law, and I think I can tell you some of the things which they are thinking and which, frankly, have us worried.

Under paragraph 1 of section 2 it is made mandatory that these committees shall examine all applications. A farmer who might be a prospective committeeman, will say to us, "I must at least look at every application, otherwise I would be open to the charge that I was not fulfilling my civic responsibility."

Then we come to a much more serious matter under section 2, in which the law says that these county committees shall examine and appraise farms in the county with respect to which an application for a loan is made, and the farmer will say, "I have to live in this county. I am not going to get in any back-room session and pick out five people who might be worthy of these loans, and then have several hundred farmers say to me, 'The law says you should at least have examined all farms, where an application was filed, and you never came out; you never came near me. I don't think this is an American way of discharging your responsibility.'

Frankly, we are up against a very serious problem; and my hope is that once the program gets under way we can find, through experience, ways and means of working as economically as is possible under the law.

Mr. CANNON. Let me ask you this question: In selecting the farmer, are you selecting the farm or will you first select the farmer and then select the farm for the farmer? Will you take the farmer

and the farm he is on, or will you select the farmer and then select the farm? It would seem to me that it would certainly be a great mistake if you limited yourselves to the farmer and the farm that he happens to be on.

First you ought to select the man, and then he ought to be free, if you are going to make this a success. The farmer ought not to be limited to the farm he happens to be on. It might or might not-the chances are it would not as well serve the purpose as if he covered the entire county. Has there been any recent decision on that?

Mr. PERKINS. I am inclined to think that in practice, with a limited amount of money, and with no time to get out and locate other farms in the county

Mr. CANNON (interposing). I think you have all the time in the world. What is the rush about this? Let us do this right. This is a very important experiment.

Mr. PERKINS. I do not mean time in the sense of not having enough days, but I mean time in the sense of having enough money to pay the county committeemen. The simpler we make their work, the more we can conserve public funds, and the greater the number of counties in which we can operate.

We are planning now, under the administrative discretion given the Secretary, to limit the number of applications which the county committee may have to consider, if we can find a way to do it; but we have not found an adequate answer yet.

Mr. CANNON. It seems to me that you are proceeding in an uneconomical way if you are going to limit yourself to the farmer and the farm which he is on. You ought to have the whole personnel of that county before you when you select the farmer.

Mr. WOODRUM. It may be that the very reason that one of these men is a tenant farmer instead of an owner is because he is on the wrong kind of farm.

Mr. CANNON. Certainly; and it might be a dairy farm or a hog farm or some other kind of farm which might not fit in with your plans at all.

Mr. PERKINS. I would like to emphasize very definitely my agreement with you, but I would also like to point out, as a practical matter, that this policy is more apt to be followed in subsequent years than in the first year. The line of least resistance this year will be in the direction of selecting the four or five good tenants who are on good farms in any given county. You can always find a half dozen good tenants on good land in any rural county.

Mr. CANNON. I think you could go into the average county and buy nine-tenths of the farms and pay a reasonable market value. Mr. PERKINS. You may be right.

Mr. CANNON. I think you will be besieged with men who want to sell you farms.

Mr. PERKINS. That is exactly my point. It will not be hard to find four or five good tenants on four or five good farms in any one county; and during the first year the pressure on the local committees will be such that, following the line of least resistance, they are apt to make their selections in this fashion.

SUGGESTED METHOD OF SELECTING FARMS

Mr. CANNON. I think you can make this a great deal more difficult if you want to do it. If you are going to require a whole lot of clerical work; if you are going to require these committees to make a report on every farm in the county, which is purely waste motion, you are going to vastly increase the cost of this whole program, and you are going to decrease your chances of success.

Take any man in my county-and my county is an average countyany farmer in my county could tell you at once whether he would consider any particular farm. He could sit right down in his chair and tell you whether he would consider any particular farm really worth considering. A man would come in and say, "I want you to buy my farm for this experiment", and you could turn right away to the other man on the committee, and he would say, "I know that farm; that farm will not do." In one day you could limit the number of farms eligible to half a dozen farms. Now, if you are going to do it in that practical, common-sense, matter-of-fact way, you are going to decrease the cost of this program; but if you are going to say, "No; you gentlement must submit here to Washington a questionnaire, all filled out; they must have visited every farm that is suggested", they will have to go and see two or three hundred farms and go through a long rigmarole and make a report on them, when they know, when the name of the farmer is mentioned to them, without looking at it, that they are not going to select that farm.

Now, you certainly are not going to go through that rigmarole. Mr. PERKINS. I agree with you.

Mr. CANNON. When they get the farm itself, then let them make a report on the farm that they select. If they are going to make a report on every farmi suggested, it is utterly senseless, it is a termendous waste of money, it is going to increase the cost of this experiment materially and it is going to interfere with its success.

Mr. WOODRUM. Let me interpolate this at this point, too: It is just another one of the vast fields of comprehensive and increasing difficulties and trials and tribulations that you run into. You go into your county; this committee starts into a long, laborious, detailed examination of all the farms in the county; they go out to this farm and that farm and the other farm, and they say, "How many bushels of wheat did you have; how many hogs did you raise" and this, that, and the other; and they get all this detailed information. It may be that your neighbor there was not particularly interested in the beginning, but now he wants to sell his farm.

The people of this country have learned to write their Congressmen and Senators. Immediately he writes: "My Dear Mr. Cannon", or "My Dear Senator Clark: Please take it up with Mr. Perkins down there at the Farm Tenancy Administration. My application is in. have submitted it, and here are letters from all my friends, and here are photographs of my farm. It is the best farm in the county. Take it up with them and see if they will purchase my farm." It overwhelms me when I think of the difficulties this will stir up, when it does not amount to a hill of beans.

Mr. CANNON. And when we reject his farm, he says, "I am not in sympathy with the whole program. I am not going to cooperate with the Extension Service; I am out of the whole thing." And you have got discord throughout the whole county, wholly without reason.

Mr. PERKINS. Mr. Cannon, we are jointly aware of this difficulty. Now, I am not saying that there are not ways of getting around it. Mr. CANNON. Let me say right here that these men that you select. are human. They enjoy the brief authority which their office confers and, of course, they would like to take this little trip over the county 5 days a month and get their $3 a day, and if you give them a good excuse, of course, they are going to work 5 days a month for a long time. But if you ask them to get together and select the farm and the man that they consider best qualified, and then make a report on the farm, they can do that in 2 or 3 days.

Mr. PERKINS. Might I point out that the Department, when asked for its opinion on this matter, in the hearings, was definitely opposed to county committees set up in this particular fashion. It wanted advisory committees.

Mr. CANNON. These men are farmers. They know the land and they know the men, and they are passing on their neighbors. They are passing on the farms with which they have been familiar since childhood. I think the selection ought to be made by these three men. I heartily approve of it. But you ought to have done with it. It ought not to be drawn out, with a lot of clerical work connected with it, and a lot of unnecessary reports.

Mr. PERKINS. The Department did not object to the idea of advisory county committees, but it felt that there was a better procedure for doing this work locally. We are still hoping to overcome the present difficulty. But my point is, that in getting up an estimate for county committees, when we have to operate under a law which says that these committees shall examine every application that is made

Mr. CANNON (interposing). I cannot conceive of any greater waste of money, and I will utterly refuse to provide money for such a senseless, extravagant, indefensible method. The idea of making a detailed examination and report on farms which they know before they start out cannot possibly be considered. And that is what you are going to do with a program like this.

Mr. PERKINS. No, no. Here is what we hope to do. The law says that when the application comes in the committee members must examine it. We hope to work out a preliminary form to be filed, which we may be able to do under the administrative discretion given to the Secretary. Then we hope that we can do the culling to the point where there will not be an unreasonable number of final applications. My whole point is, that because of this situation it is hard to say whether $212,000 is too much or too little for the county committees, but I assure you that we are not going to spend any more than we have to spend for this purpose in any single county.

DISTRIBUTION OF ESTIMATE OF FUNDS REQUIRED UNDER TITLE I

Mr. WOODRUM. I wish you would give us a break-down of your estimate under this section.

Mr. PERKINS. I will do so.

(The statement requested is as follows:)