Get Off That Tiger

The American Farm Bureau Federation has long waged a gallant--and losing--war against heavy-handed Government controls on agriculture.

Representing 1,600,000 farmer families, the bureau is the biggest of the nation's agricultural organizations. It wants nothing so much as a return to free enterprise on the farm, cherishes nothing more than the hope of being untouched and untroubled by a big-spending Agriculture Department that figures to cough up $3 billion in price supports in the current fiscal year. Last week some 5,000 farmers went to the organization's convention in Atlanta and determined to make a do-or-die effort to clean up the farm mess.

"Rule or Ruin." The delegates rallied in shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity around Farm Bureau President Charles B. Shuman. In his opening speech Shuman put the pitchfork to present agricultural programs. The Agriculture Department, he said, seems "determined to either rule or ruin American agriculture." He called the costly price-support system a ''morass into which we have floundered." He warned farmers that a "vast bureaucracy of tens of thousands of political payrollers is around our neck." Then, switching to a proverb he never heard in his own Illinois. Shuman said: "Our situation in agriculture brings to mind the old adage, 'He who rides a tiger should first make plans for dismounting.' The challenge farmers face is how to dismount the farm program 'tiger' without getting wounded."

At Shuman's fiery urging, Farm Bureau delegates approved a massive home-town campaign to convince farmers they should vote no in a national wheat referendum next spring. By their vote then, U.S. farmers will decide whether a rigid new wheat control and marketing plan should go into effect in 1964. The plan, hatched by Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, calls for double-barreled controls--with Government limits not only on acreage planted in wheat, but on the amount of wheat a farmer can sell at top price-support levels.

The Government says it needs both controls because smart farmers got around simple acreage controls by pouring on the fertilizer, producing more per acre, then selling it at the generous prices backed by the Government. That, as usual, cost the taxpayer a scandalous amount of money. Through controls on how many bushels a farmer can sell at top support levels, Freeman claims he can save some cash.

"Farmers or Bureaucrats?" The wheat referendum needs a two-thirds yes vote from farmers before it becomes law. Freeman is already on a hard-sell campaign for yes men. In the Midwest last week, he defined the issue: "Each wheat farmer will be deciding between $2 wheat and $1 wheat."

Charles Shuman thinks it is more basic than that. The referendum is so vital, says Shuman, that it could answer--once and for all--the questions he asked his delegates in Atlanta: "Who will run the farms of America? Will it be farmers or political bureaucrats?"

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