The Great Society, Country Style

The President's annual farm message is a melancholy event: it invariably proposes the waste of several billion dollars.

President Johnson's farm program, sent to Congress last week, is no exception.

It would cost nearly as much as the present $6.9 billion. Even more distressing, the President obviously recognized past and present failures ("We need to change much of our thinking on farm policy"), but declined to take action. For the future, he offered only another "fundamental examination of the entire agricultural policy of the United States."

Far from recommending that farm subsidies, on which the U.S. is now spending $3.1 billion a year, be cut back, Johnson warned that the removal of price props "would have a catastrophic effect on farm income." He urged that present programs for wheat, feed grains, cotton, tobacco, rice and wool "be extended and improved." He also said that additional programs for other commodities are in the works and that "recommendations will be made as circumstances may require."

Noting that the basic cause of farm programs is the U.S. farmer's "enormous capacity to produce," Johnson recommended a long-range plan to remove between 50 million and 80 million acres of land from crop production, convert them to such nonagricultural uses as parks, forests and highway beautification. Such a program, he said, would supplement present acreage diversion and allotment plans, and eventually would more than pay for itself. In the meantime, Administration officials estimated, the plan would cost at least $100 million a year.

Johnson called for "a national policy for rural America, with parity of opportunity as its goal." He listed some "harsh facts" of U.S. rural life, including such statistics as: 46% of rural families have incomes of less than $3,000 a year; one-fourth of all farm homes and one-fifth of all rural nonfarm homes are without running water; the educational attainment of rural dwellers lags two years behind that of their urban cousins, and health facilities are poor by comparison. "These deficiencies," the President said, "leave too few resources to support education, health, and other public services essential to development of the talent, skills and earning power of the people."

To do something about it, Johnson said that he already had ordered Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman to establish a Rural Community Development Service within the Department of Agriculture to assist other federal agencies in extending their various services to rural areas. As for Congress, Johnson recommended that it enact legislation to equalize the availability of home-mortgage credit in urban and rural areas. He also asked Congress to raise the limits on the Department of Agriculture's loan-insurance program, which insures farm-ownership loans as well as rural-community improvement loans. "We have the opportunity now to provide the means by which people in rural towns and on inadequate farms can join the march toward a better life," Johnson said. "We must seize this opportunity."

It all added up to a blueprint for the Great Society, country style.

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