Soil Bank: A Winning Bet

The American farmer, as canny a speculator as ever cashed a three-horse parlay, hemmed and hawed about the new soil-bank program served up by Congress in late May, consulted his form charts and then made his decision: a heavy bet on the soil bank to win. Last week, the deadline for the 1956 signup past, the Agriculture Department reported that nearly 500,000 farmers had agreed to take 10,720,749 acres out of production, would thereby reap a cash harvest of $225 million in Government payments come fall. The 1956 bank balance more than satisfied Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, who had reckoned the total might be as little as 8,000,000 acres.

Because of election-year congressional wrangling (TIME, April 16 et seq.), the bank had got off to a late start. Most winter wheat was waving in the breezes, and most corn farmers saw more chance for profit in raising crops for the guaranteed support prices of $1.50 a bushel under acreage control or $1.25 for over allotment corn. Then came the drought. Fiery winds seared crops in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Farmers looked at their parched and wilted fields, hied themselves off to the soil bank, signed on the dotted line and went back home to plow their stunted crops into the earth.

Soil-bank payments will begin in September or October, and they will pour into the hardest-hit areas in the pivotal Midwestern states; e.g., Iowa stands to get about $39 million, Nebraska some $32 million. Certainly the Republicans would have been in trouble without the soil bank, but with it these normally Republican states seem likely to stay that way. Most farmers like the idea of the soil bank; they clearly identify it with the Eisenhower Administration. They believe it is good for the land, good for income, and the first hopeful attack they have yet seen on the haunting problem of surpluses.

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