"You've Got To Give Us a Price"

Once again this week the professional farm leaders descended on Washington to fight for higher prices.

Quick and efficient from long practice, they set about laying their battle lines. They rounded up friends and satellites, isolated foes, started political pressures back home, conferred on strategy.

This was an old pattern: last September the farm bloc came perilously close to forcing through Congress an inflationary bill that would have handed a few top-drawer farmers billions of dollars at the consumers' expense.

But this time the Farm Bureau's Edward Asbury O'Neal III, the National Grange's Albert S. Goss and the representatives of smaller farm pressure groups were smugly confident they could put through a broad-beam farm program of their own. In the new Congress they counted on a bigger, friendlier farm bloc. They knew the country, desperately in need of more food, was hardly disposed to much argument about ways of getting it. And their onetime friend and present opponent, the Agriculture Department, was scared and two-minded about policies.

The lobbyists had their tactical outlines ready.

First is an all-out attempt to boost farm prices by changing the bases for calculating the farm parity (although farm income now is 15% above parity), busting loose OPA and its price ceilings.

Second is an attack on New Deal farm agencies, particularly Farm Security Administration, which by loans and counsel has been helping hundreds of thousands of small (i.e., non-Farm Bureau) farmers to double their war-needed food production. These agencies the lobbyists hold to be social experiments and luxuries in wartime.

Third is getting recognition for agriculture as a wartime industry--in terms of more rubber, more money, gasoline, manpower, transportation.

For winning their battle, the farm leaders have tested devices: direct farm bills, amendments attached to administration measures, restrictive riders to appropriation bills. Exclaimed Ed O'Neal: "By God, if this is a war industry, you've got to give us a price."

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