See It Now?

CBS ANNOUNCER: Because of this special See It Now report on The Farm Problem, the Johnny Carson Show, sponsored by the makers of JellO, and the Quiz Kids, sponsored by the makers of Anacin, usually presented over many of these stations, will not be seen tonight.

EDWARD R. MURROW: Good evening. This is See It Now . . . Tonight, "The Farm ProblemA Crisis of Abundance." This is the Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson [camera swings to a bespectacled Mr. Benson'], who is ... going to sit here and watch this program with us and take an occasional note . . .

(Camera shifts to Corning, Iowa, where an auctioneer is conducting a "closing-out sale" on the ids-acre farm of 31-year-old Dale E. Peterson.)

MURROW: There is a time to live and a time to die--a time to sow and a time to reap--a time to laugh and a time to cry. This auction might well be called the death of a small farm . . . Dale Peterson was one of about 3,000 Iowa small farmers who quit in the last six months. In the nation, 600,000 have given up in the last four years. . . Some economists and agricultural experts claim that we are witnessing the death of the small farm in the United States--that in a world of machines and chemicals there is room only for bigness. Others claim it's only the inefficient marginal farm that can't survive .

(The auctioneer knocks down Dale Peterson's cattle, hogs and plow at fractional prices, and the camera swings away from Corning. It swings expertly for the next 45 minutes through farms and storage bins around the nation, through the giant stockpiles of grain stored in Liberty ships, finally catches youngsters in Washington singing America the Beautiful. Then it comes back to the grim visage of Secretary Benson, who has indeed been taking an occasional note.)

BENSON: . . . Most interesting ... No one questions that agriculture is in a serious squeeze between rising prices for things farmers buy and declining prices for products they sell . . . [But] I want to dispel once and for all any impression . . . that thousands of farmers in Iowa and elsewhere are being driven off their farms . . . The facts are that farm foreclosures are at or near their record low . . . Any attempt, I feel, to persuade the American farmer that the small farmer is dying in Iowa or anywhere else is a perversion of the truth. And I think it's demagoguery at its worst . . .

Epilogue

CORNING, IOWA, Jan. 27 (AP) -There's still a Peterson family on the farm that Dale E. Peterson left last month to take his family to California where he thought he might "do better." Dale's younger brother William, 25, his wife and their three boys have rented the. place on which Dale had his "quitting farming" sale, televised on the Murrow-Benson program last night . . . "We had a letter from [Dale] Thursday," said Mrs. Bill Peterson. "Dale has a job in a warehouse in Glendale ... He just sold out because he thought he could do better in California. And they like it fine so far."

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