AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT-STATION WORK IN

PORTO RICO

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE,
Wednesday, May 21, 1930.

The committee met at 10.15 o'clock a. m., Hon. Gilbert N. Haugen (chairman) presiding.

The committee had under consideration the following bill:

[H. R. 12479, Seventy-first Congress, second session]

A BILL To coordinate the agricultural experiment-station work and to extend the benefits of certain acts of Congress to the Territory of Porto Rico

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1933, the Territory of Porto Rico shall be entitled to share in the benefits of the act entitled "An act to establish agricultural experiment stations in connection with the colleges established in the several States under the provisions of an act approved July 2, 1862, and of the acts supplementary thereto, approved March 2, 1887, as amended and supplemented, and of the act entitled "An act to provide for cooperative agricultural extension work between the agricultural colleges in the several States receiving the benefits of an act of Congress approved July 2, 1862, and of acts supplementary thereto, and the United States Department of Agriculture," approved May 8, 1914, and of acts supplementary thereto: Provided, That the experiment station so established shall be connected with the College of Agriculture of the University of Porto Rico and it shall be conducted jointy and in collaboration with the existing Federal experiment station in Porto Rico in enlarging and expanding the work of the said Federal station on cooperative plans approved by the Secretary of Agriculture; and the Secretary of Agriculture shall coordinate the work of the Territorial stations with that of the Federal station and of the United States Department of Agriculture in the island: Provided further, That the several experiment stations now conducted by the insular government shall be transferred to and coordinated with the experiment station of the College of Agriculture of the University of Porto Rico, together with whatever funds that are available for the support of the same, and the Secretary of Agriculture may at his discretion transfer such land, buildings, and equipment as he may deem necessary to the experiment station of the College of Agriculture of the University of Porto Rico: Provided further, That the Territory of Porto Rico shall make provision for such additional buildings and permanent equipment as may be necessary for the development of the work.

SEC. 2. To carry into effect the above provisions for extending to Porto Rico the benefits of the act of March 2, 1887, and supplementary acts in the order and amounts designated by these acts, the following sums are hereby authorized to be appropriated in addition to the amounts appropriated to the Department of Agriculture for use in Porto Rico: $15,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1933; $20,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1934; $25,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1935; $30,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936; $35,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1937; $40,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1938; $45,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1939; $50,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1940; $60,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1941; $70,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1942; $80,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1943; and $90,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1944, and thereafter a sum equal to that provided for each State and Territory for agricultural experiment stations established under the act of March 2, 1887.

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SEC. 3. The permanent annual appropriations provided for in section 3 of said act of May 8, 1914, and of acts supplementary thereto are hereby authorized to be increased by an amount necessary to carry out the provisions of this act, but without diminishing or increasing the amount to which any State or the Territory of Hawaii is entitled under the provisions of said act of May 8, 1914, and of acts supplementary thereto: Provided, That for the fiscal year 1933 the total amount available to the Territory of Porto Rico under the terms of the act of May 8, 1914, shall be $50,000, this amount to be increased by $10.000 annually, or such part thereof as may be necessary, until the total to which Porto Rico is entitled under the provisions of this act is reached. Participation in other Federal appropriations for cooperative extension work, including those authorized by the act of May 22, 1928, shall be at such times and in such amounts as shall be estimated by the Secretary of Agriculture and appropriated by the Congress.

STATEMENT OF HON. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, GOVERNOR OF PORTO RICO

Mr. ROOSEVELT. With your permission I would like first of all to outline the existing conditions in Porto Rico. To begin with, we were entirely an agricultural island in the past. To-day the largest number of our people draw their livelihood, either directly or indirectly, from agriculture.

We are confronted with some very serious problems. The first, of course, is that we are poverty-stricken, desperately poverty-stricken. Sixty per cent of our people are either out of work part or the whole of the year. The average wage return or earning is about $150 to $200 a year. Our climate is a splendid climate, a 12-months-a-year climate. We can grow crops right straight through the 12 months. We have, however, a very large population for our area; we have 1,543,000 people on an island 100 by 35 miles. That is about 430 to the square miles. That gives you an idea of the difficulty of our agricultural problem.

In addition to that, our land has become concentrated far too much in the hands of certain big individuals or companies. Our island topographically consists of rather steep hills in the center, belted by a fertile coastal plain.

Our crops in the past were primarily sugar, coffee, tobacco, and fruit. The sugar was handled, to all intents and purposes, entirely by large companies or individuals in the low country, the coastal plain. About half of our sugar production, which is in the neighborhood of 850,000 tons this year, is in the hands of four companies.

Now, the two great aims that we wish to accomplish in our island to help the little fellow is, first of all, to try to return to the farm, or try to return the lands, where possible, into the hands of the small farmer, and second, to encourage the development of such agriculture as will make it possible for the small farmer to exist; in other words, intensive agriculture. In order to accomplish these two ends we have adopted a diversity of governmental policies. The first one of these has to deal with the question of trying to return farms to small farmers. Unlike our territories in the States here, we never had a big block of public lands to be used for homesteading; in our government tract in Porto Rico the public lands were very scant in extent and of the poorest land in the island. We formed a commission some years ago called the Homestead Commission, which commission had for its function the establishment on such government lands as existed of

small farmers with their own farms. Now that day is past, because all the Government land of any value has already been settled.

This year we are expanding that work in the following fashion: We have provided money for the commission by an issue of bonds. In the interior, due to the cyclone disaster, the farmers with larger farms are poverty-stricken the same as the little fellow. They are anxious to sell a half to two-thirds of their farms in order to provide money to work the remaining third. We in the homestead commission are going to take advantage of the cheap price afforded by that situation, buy that land, turn it into the Homestead Commission, and we will follow this procedure: We will divide the land into small farms. That is what we are doing now, too.

Mr. HOPE. About what size?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Two and a half acres to 20 acres, depending on the richness of the land. Each plot we will turn over to a farmer; he will build his house on that and start cultivating his crops. He will pay to the insular government in rent a sum which will within a certain number of years return the entire cost price of the farm to the government and give that small farmer the title to his farm outright. In order to facilitate that we have at each one of these government settlements a government agriculturist with a small farm where he is breeding stock, seeds, and so forth, and he goes from little far to little farm advising the farmers how to handle themselves, what crops to grow, and so forth. In addition, he helps them organize cooperatives so that they can get their produce marketed. It has worked very well. We have some 900 farms now in existence and we have had only 1 per cent default in payments.

Now, that is one big measure we are undertaking. The second is to get practical farm education for our people. I gave you our big crops. We are of the opinion that intensive cultivation can be carried on in certain phases of agriculture which have not heretofore been touched in the island, particularly vegetables. We can, for example, sell vegetables, fresh vegetables, to the north during the fall and winter months very profitably, and you can grow on your farms there, on account of the climate, a tobacco crop and then vegetable crops the same year. Now, in order to get practical education, we are starting to foster rural schools. We have got some 13 founded now, and we are hoping to found 12 more in the coming year. Those rural schools have in their curriculum reading, writing, arithmetic, and English. About 60 per cent of their curriculum consists in absolutely practical instruction. Around each school there is a farm plot, and the boys of the school cultivate that farm plot themselves with their own hands, under the direction of a practical dirt farmer. They learn their farming, not from blackboards or pamphlets, but from digging in the ground. In addition, the children are encouraged to have at their homes small truck gardens. Those are inspected at periods, and we give them prizes for the best ones; but again, they are practical prizes, a pig, chicken, seed-things of that nature.

Now, while that is going on, the girls are instructed in home economics; home economics of the simplest sort that is fitted to the simple surroundings in which they live. They are instructed in sewing, cooking; they are instructed in embroidery as a means of earning a little money outside. While that is an additional work for the school, each school has a social service director who goes through

the surrounding farms and goes into the homes and instructs the people there how to get along with the tools and means that are in those particular homes.

I forgot to say also that in addition to the farming instruction we teach the boys such things as simple carpentry in order that they may be able to make the chairs, benches, beds, and things that they use in their own homes. Incidentally, those schools are very inexpensive. We run them on a very inexpensive basis. It costs to support one of those schools during the year about nine to ten thousand dollars, and that is all, the children growing food, you see, for their school lunches in the garden, the girls doing the cooking, washing, and so forth, and the boys building the school furniture. This is in their carpentry work.

Mr. KINCHELOE. What percentage of the farmers of Porto Rico own their land?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. That would be very difficult to say. Perhaps Doctor Chardon can give you the information. Our last census report gave about 36,000 farms, didn't it? That was a decrease from 10 years ago.

Mr. KINCHELOE. As I have been in Porto Rico twice, I know there is a very small percentage of the farmers who own their land. Mr. ROOSEVELT. A very small per cent.

Mr. KINCHELOE. What per cent of the land that is grown in tobacco does the American Tobacco Co. own?

Mr. CHARDON. The American Tobacco Co. is now retired. It is simply an industrial enterprise. They have sold their land. Mr. KINCHELOE. Whom did they sell it to?

Mr. CHARDON. They have sold to the other tobacco farmers. Mr. KINCHELOE. We have in Porto Rico only two classes of people, that is, the peasants and what you might call extraordinarily wealthy people. We do not have the average citizen as we have in this country, a man who owns his little home. That is an exception rather than a rule.

Mr. ROOSEVELT. That is what we are striving to build up, sir. That is what our policy is all tending toward. There is the machine we are trying to build up for the island.

Mr. KINCHELOE. What I had in mind, was, Governor, if the landlords of the island own most and the cream of the land, how are you ever going to help the fellow who tills the land but does not own it? Mr. ROOSEVELT. Well, in the first place

Mr. KINCHELOE. That really needs help?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. In the first place, I explained to you in the beginning, what we are doing here is to try to get opportunities. We are building opportunities day by day through our homestead commission to put people back on the land. We are fostering that in every way that we can and are throwing every ounce of effort we have behind the homestead commission. The second thing we are doing is to try to educate the people in such fashion that after we get them back on the homestead, on the land, they are going to be able to hold and develop their land.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Well, these earls of the land over there who own all this great proportion of it, are they ready to sell that at a reasonable price?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Some are and some are not. It depends. Here, for example, is something we are doing now. Here is a typical instance of absentee landlordism. There is a tract up near Lares called the El Duque tract. It has about 8,000 acres in it. I ran on it one day when I was riding with Doctor Chardon and we went up to inspect it. That tract of 8,000 acres is owned by certain French people. They are the descendants of a French nobleman who was given the land a hundred or more years ago for services in the Peninsular War in Spain by the Spanish King. As far as I know none of them has ever been to the island. Now, this year I got a law through the legislature allowing us to condemn that land. There are 600 families, renters, living on the farm there.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Can they condemn it for private purposes?
Mr. ROOSEVELT. For public purposes.

Mr. KINCHELOE. What public purposes?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Homestead commission.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Your homestead commission?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes, sir; condemn it for the homestead commission; buy it for the homestead commission; and during the next year we will inaugurate there the system I have outlined and convert those 600 small farms into farm owners, property owners.

Mr. KINCHELOE. May I ask one more question?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Go right ahead.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Did you say the American Tobacco Co. have sold their land and they are no longer producers of tobacco?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. They are manufacturers pure and simple.

Mr. KINCHELOE. Whom did they sell to?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. They sold to any number of people.

Some of it

went to sugar companies, some back into the hands of small farmers, some into the hands of medium farmers.

It is not quite fair to say that we have only those two classes. As a matter of fact, we have three. We have the very big farmer, as represented by the sugar company, as represented by these people that are sugar companies that I spoke about in this tract of land. Then we have a medium farmer who owns 100 to 200 acres, and we have quite a number of those; some of them 300 acres.

Mr. KINCHELOE. That is infinitesimal compared to the population. Mr. ROOSEVELT. It is small compared to the population. And then we have this particular class that we are trying most earnestly to build up, which is the small farmer, whose farm would range somewhere from 21⁄2 acres, perhaps, to 30. That is where we are throwing the big end of our effort. Now, those two activities that I described were two of the main things that we believe will work toward that particular end.

Mr. KETCHAM. Isn't that stretching the eminent-domain idea? Mr. ROOSEVELT. Condemning lands belonging to one man to sell to another?

Mr. KETCHAM. Do you regard the emergency as sufficient to justify that?

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Yes. It is a desperate emergency, frankly. I know on that tract what is going on. There are the French owners. They in turn rent to a local person, and he in turn farms it out to those 600 farmers.