One Farm Program That Works

-RURAL DEVELOPMENT

IN campaigning for billions in price supports, Washington politicos often give the impression that the subsidies benefit all of America's 5,400,000 farm families. Actually, only a minority gets them, since only five crops (wheat, corn, cotton, rice and tobacco) are supported, and they are produced by the nation's most prosperous farmers. Left out almost completely are some 2,500,000 marginal farmers. These underfed and ill-housed families are a farm problem that few Congressmen talk about. Last week Congress grudgingly voted $2,500,000 for their benefit, a cut of $1,500,000 below the amount President Eisenhower urgently requested this year for Rural Development, the nation's newest farm program.

Rural Development is one of the few farm programs that really work. Yet it gets a cold reception from politicians because it is prompted by an unpleasant fact that they prefer to ignore. The fact: too many farmers are trying to scratch out a living on farms that are too small to be profitable. From 1930 to 1954, the average U.S. farm jumped from 157 to 242 acres. But with the cost of mechanization, even that is not enough to support a single family in many areas. And in hundreds of scrubby farming counties, the cultivated area per farm averages as little as 8 1/2 acres.

To make the first broad-scale assault ever attempted on this problem, the Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Labor, and Health, Education and Welfare Departments, at President Eisenhower's orders, selected 54 counties and three multi-county areas in the Southeast, Southwest, New England, along the Ohio River valley and in the Great Lakes area as laboratories in which to test a new idea. The big idea: to encourage local farm leaders, businessmen, clergymen and others to take over and work out their own farm-improvement plans, tailored to their own needs, with technical and loan assistance supplied by their state and the Federal Government.

In the test counties, farmers got a choice. If they wanted to keep on farming, they were shown how to farm better, got help in buying more land and equipment. Others were helped in getting jobs in town or industry. Rural Development has also persuaded industries to locate plants in distressed rural areas, and has aided farmers in starting their own businesses.

In Price County, Wis., Gordon Johnson, who was a misfit at dairying, last week started work on his first glass-fiber boat in his new company. In Monroe County, Ohio, ministers sparked a countywide poll of the labor force, which helped attract a new Olin Mathieson aluminum plant. In Espanola. N. Mex., fruitgrowers were helped to build a plant to grade and pack their apples and peaches. In Choctaw County, Okla.. which was losing population in droves, a new cannery, a glove factory and a feed mill were established.

With the help of Rural Development, many farmers are learning to be better farmers. In Lewis County, W. Va., Rural Development last year helped twelve farmers buy 146 Western ewes. In one season they made enough from their lambs and wool to pay back the loan, this year will pocket a sizable profit from their almost vertical hillside pastures.

In Tippah County, Miss., farmers were giving up their homesteads at the rate of nearly 100 a year, forced out of business by the cotton acreage cuts. The county was helped by Rural Development to launch a brand-new dairy industry. Merchants raffled off 27 prize Jersey cows as breeding stock, put up $25,000 to start a processing plant. The plant opened Feb. 1, paid back the loan in full June 1. A similar shift is going on in Chesterfield County, S.C., hard-hit by the cutbacks in tobacco acreage, where Rural Development is encouraging farmers to use tobacco barns no longer needed for curing tobacco to dry out and store sweet potatoes. For many families, Rural Development means the amenities of living, whose lack is incomprehensible to many other Americans. In tiny La Canada de los Alamos, N. Mex., 13 Spanish-speaking families, thanks to Rural Development, now have a community well, ending generations of carrying water uphill.

Surveying such accomplishments, all brought about in little over a year with a federal cash outlay of only $2,100,000 (the cost of storing Government price-supported crop surpluses for two days), some enthusiasts believe that if Rural Development were vastly expanded, it would be an answer for the whole farm problem. But most experts point out that the plan's success is due to the fact that it relies on local and state initiative rather than a vast new federal bureaucracy to dictate to farmers. As Editor F. W. Heath of the Price County, Wis. weekly Bee put it last week: "At last we are beginning to realize that 'we' are the 'they' we talk about when we want something done."

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