A Farewell to Farms

"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?" a once popular song used to ask. Nowadays, that is not the problem at all. In an agricultural policy paper published this week, the Committee for Economic Development, a highly respected organization of top-level businessmen and educators, takes a cool-eyed look at the Federal Government's farm mess and concludes that the essential problem is how to get more of the nation's farmers off the farms.

Fact to Be Faced. Since the late 1940s, overall U.S. farm output per worker has more than doubled. As a result, total farm production has greatly increased, despite a steady migration of farmers and sons of farmers into nonfarm jobs. But U.S. demand for farm products has failed to keep pace with the supply, and the result has been an oversupply that has put persistent downward pressure on farm prices and farmers' incomes.

The Government for the past decade has tried to cope with this situation by means of what C.E.D. calls a ''protectionist approach"--a web of price supports and production controls designed to keep farm incomes up and output down (TIME, June 29). But this approach has failed: despite the burdensome costs of U.S. farm programs, farm incomes have lagged substantially behind the growth of U.S. per capita income.

As an alternative, C.E.D. advocates what it calls an "adaptive approach"--farm policies that work along with market forces instead of against them, and that aim toward an eventual free market in agriculture. The essential fact to be faced, argues C.E.D., is that with present high levels of farm productivity, more labor is engaged in agricultural production than the market demands--in short, there are too many farmers. To solve that problem, C.E.D. offers a program with three main prongs.

Down to Zero. The first is an immediate slash in present price supports, which tend to perpetuate overproduction by making it profitable to grow crops that are already in oversupply. C.E.D. proposes to cut the supports to the estimated levels that would prevail in a free market after supply and demand had come into equilibrium. The U.S. Government would maintain these "adjustment" supports for five years, then get out of the price-support business completely and permanently. For wheat and a few other oversupply crops, the cut in price would be so great that growers would suffer too drastic a drop in income; for these farmers. C.E.D. proposes temporary "income protection" subsidies, which would shrink year by year and come to an end altogether after five years.

In the meantime, during those five years, the other prongs of the C.E.D. plan would work toward making any price supports unnecessary. C.E.D. urges various measures for helping low-income farmers, and rural youngsters headed toward farming, to earn a living in nonfarm occupations. The proposals include 1) improvements in rural education, with a shift of emphasis from training for agriculture to training for industry, 2) extension of federal-state unemployment services to rural areas. 3) retraining programs for farmers, and even 4) direct grants to farm families moving off the land and into industrial centers.

Still another prong would consist of measures to divert land from production of crops now in oversupply--a temporary five-year "soil bank," plus a special plan for transforming wheatlands on the arid western fringes of the wheat belt into grasslands for grazing cattle.

Everybody but Bureaucrats. If all these measures were adopted, says C.E.D., the number of U.S. farmers would decline by one-third within the next five years. But those remaining in farming would enjoy higher incomes, without price supports or controls, than U.S. farmers now average with all the Government's expensive help. The yearly costs of U.S. farm programs would decline by billions of dollars. Farmers, ex-farmers, consumers and taxpayers--everybody except perhaps some ex-bureaucrats--would be better off. "The program we are proposing," says C.E.D., "is aimed at realization--for the farmer's benefit and the nation's--of the full potential of U.S. agricultural efficiency."

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