The Plan for Wheat

One week after he had laid down his plan for cotton farmers (TIME, Dec. 18), the busy Secretary of Agriculture, Claude E. Wickard, popped up in St. Paul. There he straight-armed the wheatgrowers with a plan to avoid the postwar production of surplus wheat.

Bluntly Wickard told the Northwest farmers that 1) the world market for high-priced U.S. wheat would disappear at war's end, 2) he is against Government subsidies for wheat exports. Then Wickard unwrapped his plan. He would guarantee parity prices only for wheat needed for home consumption. Farmers would have to sell any surplus wheat in the world market, at whatever price they could get.

Since few U.S. farmers can grow wheat cheaply enough to compete with Canadian and Argentine wheat, the Wickard plan might reduce U.S. wheat production to 800 million bu. a year v. the 1.1 billion bu. 1944 crop. But the Federal Government would not have to spend millions of dollars, as it did before the war, to bail out farmers by buying up surplus wheat. Day after Wickard spoke, the price of wheat broke 3-c- a bu.

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