Wild Harvest

"The Commodity Credit Corp. will soon be scraping the bottom of its financial barrel. Additional funds must be made available . . . if the Government is to keep its promises . . . to the American farmer under the present price support program." With these politicking words for the folks on the farm, Michigan's Republican Congressman Jesse Wolcott, 28 years in Congress as "a friend of the farmer," last week suggested a bill to raise the CCC's borrowing power to $5.7 billion, an increase of a cool $1 billion.

Would even that whopping sum be enough to pay for the support program? As farmers wound up the harvest of the second biggest crop in U.S. history, CCC's present bankroll seemed none too fat. The corn crop alone might hit 3.5 billion bushels and granaries were still clogged by last year's 805 million bushel surplus.

The big corn crop meant that a big pig crop was a certainty. Last week top hog prices dropped $1.25 per hundredweight in Chicago, to only $2 above the $18.50 level at which the Government must start supporting hogs and thus add another expense to the support program.

But the bumper crops would not bring cheap food; the support program would keep most prices up, despite the huge surpluses. During fiscal 1949, CCC poured out $3.1 billion for loans and purchases to keep up prices on 31 commodities, just about five times the outlay in 1948. At the fiscal year's end in June, the agency had $2.3 billion tied up in loans and inventories, showing a paper loss of $356 million for the year at current market prices. Most of the support money went for only seven commodities: cotton, $822 million; corn, $470 million; wheat, $640 million; flaxseed, linseed oil, $231 million; potatoes, $219 million; peanuts, $173 million; tobacco, $107 million. And the new fiscal year has opened with a bang: wheat support during July cost $63 million. For the coming crop year, the cost of the support program is estimated at $2.1 billion.

Some Potatoes. In theory the $2.3 billion already laid out will be recouped when CCC sells its holdings, but in actual practice the taxpayer has been hit with some fantastic losses. Because of a potato surplus in 1947, the Department of Agriculture last year restricted the acreage. But farmers simply planted rows closer together and presented CCC with a bumper crop of 446 million bushels. Net loss to date: $203 million. In the coming potato season Congress may get tougher and tell farmers, not how many acres they can plant, but how many bushels they can grow.

But no such solution is in sight for eggs. To maintain the market for shell eggs, CCC offered to buy dried eggs at $1.27 a Ib. This was such a handsome price that CCC had to buy nearly 30 million Ibs. of dried eggs. Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan is afraid the total cost may run to $200 million. Despite the enormous surplus, wholesale prices this month were the highest in a quarter century. Mourned Brannan: "The prospects for the year ahead are still more discouraging."

Unlike the egg and potato surpluses, which have been problems for years, the flaxseed surplus is a new monster of the department's own making. U.S. paint manufacturers, big users of linseed oil (crushed from flaxseed), were being gouged by Argentine suppliers at the end of World War II. So the department encouraged domestic production by pegging the price of flaxseed at $6 a bushel. The encouraged farmers raised so much flaxseed that the market collapsed. CCC loss to date on flaxseed and linseed oil: $73 million.

Why Not Beef? Beef prices have never been supported, but as the biggest cattle shipments in a year poured into Kansas City last week, and beef prices began to drop, CCC officials shuddered at one cowman's threat: "If they are going to support wheat and hogs, then by God they had better do something for beef!"

Secretary Brannan is willing to "do something for beef" and for just about every other farm product in the book (TIME, April 18). With the Hope-Aiken Act set to function in 1950, providing for a lower and more flexible level of price supports, he has advanced a counterplan to commit Agriculture to a permanent policy of high price pegs. The Brannan plan brushes aside any idea of a gradual reduction of price props, and substitutes much higher support prices pegged to an "income support standard." This would guarantee farmers an income as fat as the one they have enjoyed in the past ten years, with little thought for non-farmers who must foot the bill in taxes. This week, ex-Agriculture Secretary Clinton P. Anderson blasted the plan as unworkable.

In the long run even the farmers might rebel against the increasing controls of support programs. They can catch a glimpse of their future in the proposed new potato support program. The more openhanded the Government becomes, the more strictly it may have to control what farmers grow right down to the bushel.

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