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Washington advanced several ideas: to have farmers pool workers; to distribute itinerant workers evenly; to reduce train rates to provide better transportation for possible farm hands; to set up a central authority to manage the transfer of available farm hands. Agriculture Department planners seriously considered a subsidy scheme whereby farm wages would be forced up to the highest levels farm operators could afford. Then the Government would pay the difference between that and the level at which industrial wages become too alluring for farm boys to resist.
Land Army. Out in the country, out where strawberries got overripe for want of pickers, where hay was ready for the barns, where cotton needed chopping, farmers and officials took direct action. This meant sweat and calluses and ten hours daily (but good wages) for city-soft schoolboys, girls and women.
> Three southern Illinois counties told some 500 WPAers they must pick strawberries or become ineligible for relief. Result: some violent refusals, some sabotage of vines, but $6 a day for those filling 200 boxes.
> New York planned to ask every available man from 16 to 50 to help harvest crops, 5-32% bigger than last year.
> The U.S. Employment Service enrolled 10,000 New Jersey high-school pupils for farm work, recruited farmerettes for a land army, welcomed 127 women to vegetable and berry farms.
> In the Northwest, the U.S. Employment Service proclaimed: "Spend your weekends working on nearby farms. Spend your vacations in the Yakima and Wenatchee Valleys, or in the Willamette or Hood River Valleys," offered "healthful camping-out experience," hoped thereby to find some of the extra workers needed (69,700 in Washington alone).
> Over 1,200 adolescents in 32 high schools in & near Kansas City joined a Farm Emergency Army.
> Throughout the U.S., one fair board after another announced abandonment or curtailment of big & little fairs and expositions—functions as American as apple pie, as dear to farm families as family reunions, as sure as the harvest moon itself.
> Near Clarksville, Tex., rain jeopardized a $20,000 pea crop. The whole town (pop. 4,000) closed drum-tight, went to the fields, saved the peas.