SUGGESTS TRAINING
OF WOMEN FARMERS
Head of Governor's Labor
Commission Points Out
Manpower Shortage
TOPEKA, Oct. 22.–(AP)–Training schools for Kansas women, to prepare them for an even greater part in the 1944 harvest, were recommended today by F. O. Blecha, secretary of the governor's farm labor commission.
"If manpower continues to be drained–and I want to tell you it's getting harder and harder to find men–we will have to accept the idea that women have to accept the ideas that women will supplant men in the Kansas fields. They do it in England and there's no reason we can't do it here," he declared.
He suggested schools be held throughout the state to train women in handling farm machinery, particularly combines, tractors and trucks used in the wheat harvest.
This year, he reported, 8,000 women worked in the Kansas fields along with 23,000 men who came into the state for the harvest, 20,000 boys and girls who usually do not work on farms, and 800 war prisoners from Kansas internment camps.
With more camps planned, he recommended use of war prisoners be expanded next year and predicted some of the requirements imposed by the war department would be relaxed to make this possible.
Blecha listed three other things which, he said, would help Kansas beat the farm labor bogey again next year:
Get farm machinery repaired during the winter; continue the community co-operation used this year, with neighbors helping each other, and get town men to work in the fields during peak periods, turning their businesses over to their wives for a few days.
