End of the Row?

"The American public is not going to stand for what we have been doing much longer," said Kansas Farm Bureau President W. I. Boone last week. "The public is not going to keep on putting out money without getting results." Like many another leader in the wheat-corn belt, Boone recognized that farmers have just about harvested their way to the end of public patience with a farm subsidy program that now costs a scandalous $6.6 billion a year and gets worse with each crop (current Government-owned surplus: $9 billion).

Last month Boone's own Kansas farm-bureau convention voted for the first time in its history to back a program 1) abolishing all acreage controls on wheat, 2) dropping price supports from today's $1.80 to $1.30 per bu. Nebraska and Colorado farm-bureau conventions voted for similar programs, in effect backed the position of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson and American Farm Bureau federation President Charles Shuman.

The change, claimed its backers, would let wheat compete with corn as a feed grain, and weed out inefficient wheat producers. But chances are also good that the wheat states' big commercial growers would sow record crops if freed from controls and promised $1.30 for every bushel, thus adding to the bulging surplus.

Hunting for some other way out, the surplus-surfeited corn belt shifted its sentiment toward tighter controls. The Illinois Farm Bureau, biggest in the nation, voted for an unprecedented plan of compulsory acreage retirement, a sort of unsubsidized soil bank, plus a subsidy-in-kind scheme that would hand out Government-owned surplus grain to farmers who grow even less than their allowances. Iowa farmers leaned in the same general direction, set the stage for a rough-and-tumble battle at the American Farm Bureau convention in Chicago next week. Though none of the farm organizations brought forth really promising ideas, ground was broken by the realization that, as Kansan Boone put it, "there is a lot more urgency than I have ever seen before."

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