Ten Years of the Farm Tenant Purchase Program

Abstract

Ten years' experience suggests that the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Purchase program must be redirected if it is to serve a useful purpose in an era of high employment, rising national income, and rapid technical progress in agriculture. Many Tenant Purchase (TP) loans have been too small to make efficient use of family labor or to yield a minimum-adequate income when farm prices are not extremely high; indeed, some borrowers may have reduced their incomes by accepting loans. The loans have not been larger because local public sentiment and Congressional opinion would not tolerate much improvement in the status of tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers who were the government. Within the limits thus prescribed, it has frequently not been possible, even with the useful devices of farm planning and supervision, to create what can be called adequate units. A large increase in the amount of the average loan seems plainly called for even though land prices decline from their current high levels. But the question must be asked whether a TP program involving loans of, say, $20,000 or $30,000 can serve the purposes intended by the authors of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act or, for that matter, whether it should play any important role in a national agricultural program. So far, of course, the TP program has not played an important role. From its inception in 1937 through June 30, 1947, the period covered by this study, the Farm Security Administration (and its successor, the Farmers' Home Administration) made TP loans totaling $293,876,733 to 47,104 families. This is a very small beginning; there were still 1,858,421 tenants in 1945 and (if this were the objective) it would take the TP program nearly 400 years to make them all owners at the rate that has prevailed so far. The significance of the program does not necessarily rest on this basis however. Its proponents have always regarded it as a demonstration which (as President Roosevelt wrote in 1937) would be ex-