Rigorous Prescription

The swollen, scandalous thing sits there, an affront to political morality, economic logic and plain common sense. Truman and Eisenhower each had his turn at "the farm problem," and each left it worse than he found it. Last week the Kennedy Administration announced its farm plan.

For the past eight years, the cost of Government agricultural programs has run between $4 billion and $7 billion, ranking only behind national defense and interest on the national debt as the biggest item in the budget. Kennedy claimed that his program would cut Government costs by many millions. He proposed the most rigorous system of production controls in the history of U.S. farming. And he threatened farmers--and their Congressmen--with what has long been a political unmentionable: greatly reduced price supports, or none at all, in the inconceivable event that they refuse controls.

Offensive Burden. The Kennedy program was the product of several minds (though it is not certain that there will ever be any fight to claim the authorship). John Kennedy, as a big-city Congressman and Senator, had never been noted for lively interest in agriculture; in 1956 he voted against high farm subsidies, switched his position only after Farm Belt resentment threatened his national political ambitions. In 1962, while trying to balance the nation's budget, he can only view the huge farm burden as offensive. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, a former Governor of Minnesota, had little exposure to farms and farmers, says: "When I became Secretary of Agriculture, I did not pose as a farm expert. I expressed a sincere desire to learn." A chief author of the Kennedy Administration program was in fact ex-Professor Willard Cochrane, Freeman's director of agricultural economics, former member of the University of Minnesota faculty, and a farm brain-truster under the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations.

"The drift toward a chaotic, inefficient, surplus-ridden farm economy," said Kennedy in his message to Congress, "will resume unless prompt action is taken." The Administration claims to have halted that drift last year with emergency programs--but its plan went awry. The Government's offer of subsidies to farmers for cutting their normal acreage of corn or sorghum was intended to cut feed grain production heavily at a cost of about $500 million. Secretary Freeman maintains that the cut amounted to 800 million bushels as planned, but the program's cost--$768 million--suggests that efficient farmers were able, with the help of unusually good weather, to grow far more than the Government expected. The feed grain carryover dropped for the first time in a decade, but many farm experts claim that the Government paid more for that milestone than it would have paid by buying the surplus grain.

If the Administration has its way, the farmers will not have much chance to upset predictions. The Government would set a national acreage allotment for wheat and feed grains that is lower than expected needs, parcel out the allotment to individual farmers on the basis of past acreage, and make up the difference between production and need by drawing from the Government's stores. Wheat farmers would be told not only how much wheat they could grow, but how much they could market. Wheat and grain farmers would continue to get Government price supports so long as they stayed within their quotas, would be penalized for exceeding them. Each would be obliged to divert part of his land to recreational or conservation uses, for which the Government would pay him.

For the first time, the controls program would include dairy farmers, who are suffering from overproduction because of a slump in public demand for dairy products. They would be told how much to market (production cannot easily be controlled, since cows must be milked), and would get higher Government support for milk than at present. Whether or not dairy farmers accepted the controls, the Government would not spend more than $300 million a year to help them--about 60% of the estimated cost of the current program. If they declined, the Government would lower supports.

Common Sense. Kennedy called his farm goals "as common-sense as A B C D"--for abundance, balance, conservation and development--but the program is sure to raise a huge controversy. Said Charles B. Shuman, president of the 1,600,000-member American Farm Bureau Federation: "Naked coercion . . . fantastically expensive." To lessen such opposition before Congress acts on the plan, Kennedy dispatched Agriculture Secretary Freeman to explain his program to farmers. The Detroit Free Press reported that his speech to farmers in East Lansing, Mich., got a reception "as frosty as the snow flurries outside." With such feeling, there is almost no chance that the program will get through Congress in its present form.

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