"Florida Money"

Chill winds whipped across Kansas last week, smearing drought-mulched dust across the sky in dismal yellows. But things were not quite so grim as they looked. In Emporia, Farmer Robert George, 50-year-old bachelor, was teased by his kin for getting married, they said, on "Government rent." Ex-servicemen heading for the state V.F.W. convention joked about the wheat crop they had "already harvested." Some vacation-minded farmers counted their "Florida money." One and all, they were talking about the payments they get from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's soil bank for taking land out of surplus crops.

Though this federal program, plus the drought, has helped to cut the state's wheat acreage in half (present crop: 6,700,000 acres), it has also speeded up a three-year rise in farmland values, and given smart operators a new way to make money. In Morris County (county seat: Council Grove), Lawyer Marlin Brown and a partner got 5 1/2% insurance-company loans to buy eight farms, 1,500 acres, for an average $62.50 an acre. They plan to farm only the best 200 acres, but can put 771 of the poorer acres into the soil bank's "conservation reserve." For covering this land with Sudan grass now and sowing a permanent cover of bluestem and grama grasses next year, they expect the Government to pay upwards of $15,000, about 80% of the seed and sowing costs. This subsidized sowing qualifies the land for federal "rent" at $11 an acre this year and, under a ten-year contract beginning in 1958, an ultimate total rent just about exactly equal to their initial investment of $94,000. "We figure," says Brown, "that in ten years we can pay for the farms under the soil bank."

Other lawyers and bankers in central Kansas, now figuring the same way, have flocked to real-estate offices in search of "bankable" land, pushed the prices fast enough to give Brown a $10-an-acre profit if he were to sell out today.

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