Subsidized Size

Although it is merchandised in and out of Congress as a life belt for the ordinary farmer, the U.S.'s inflated farm program (1959 budget: $7 billion) floats its biggest loans and subsidies to the huge corporation farms. Example: Delta & Pine Land Co., a 37,000-acre, English-owned plantation in Mississippi, drew $1,167,502.35 in Government price-support loans on its 1957 cotton crop, $20,761.20 in soil-bank subsidy (now partly abandoned) for not planting riceland. Example: Westlake Farms, Inc., of Stratford, Calif., did a heads-we-win-tails-you-lose business with taxpayer money: $854,450.67 from Commodity Credit Corp. for the cotton it raised, $125,942.50 from the soil bank for the cotton it did not raise. Because of a small 1957 crop and rising prices, some big operators redeemed their loans, but the soil-bank money was all gravy.

Such shocking figures, just compiled, started to pour last week from the office of Delaware's Republican Senator John J. Williams. With the help of browbeaten Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson (TIME, March 2), Williams proved once again the case he made last session for

Benson-approved proposals to set upper limits on subsidies to the big farms. Totting up the biggest outlays, he found that ten large operators siphoned off $3,447,902.81 in price-prop money, $557,495-35 in soil-bank funds. By comparison, 1,227 farmers in tiny Delaware altogether drew but $917,286 from the soil bank. "The high rigid support program is little more than a Government guarantee on the operations of corporate-type farming," charged Williams, "and actually encourages and underwrites absentee ownership to the detriment of small farmers."

All of this was not so much a challenge to the efficiency of the big farms (see BUSINESS) as it was to the insanity of the U.S.'s farm price-support program as now administered.

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