AGRICULTURE: Farmer’s Revolt

Throughout Oregon last week, milk prices were tumbling. In Salem, housewives jammed into the Nameless Food Market for milk at 10¢ a quart; a store on Portland’s east side sold milk for 15¢ a quart; grocery chains and supermarkets chopped their prices 2¢ a quart all along the line. The cause of the big drop was an overwhelming revolt of Oregon voters against the state’s 21-year-old Milk Control Law, which set strict production and distribution quotas, minimum wholesale and retail prices. The man responsible: a modest farmer named Elmer Deetz, who runs a 12-cow dairy farm near Canby (pop. 1,000).

Actually, the battle started two years ago between Oregon’s supermarkets and the State Department of Agriculture, which enforced the controls. The law that had been passed during the depression to help dairy farmers was a hard blow to store distributors. To Oregon’s supermarkets, the minimum price provisions of the state law meant that they could not take advantage of the normal price differential between store-bought and home-delivered milk, thus lost a competitive advantage. In 1952, the markets spent $150,000 in a campaign to get the law repealed but lost out at the polls.

What aroused Deetz was the fact that the law almost put him out of business. At his small dairy farm, he sold Grade A quality milk at 16 cents under prevailing prices to customers who called with their own gallon jugs. Last year the Milk Marketing Administration told him to stop and hauled him into court because he was selling milk below minimum retail prices. Says Deetz: “I just had to fight it.”

Farmer Deetz and his customers started an “Elmer Deetz Jug Club,” printed up membership cards calling the milk law “udderly useless,” started circulating petitions for the law’s repeal. Deetz tools out a $4,000 mortgage on his small farm, got another $1,000 from customers, used it for petitions, pamphlets and radio time.

Soon Jug Clubs mushroomed all over Oregon with the slogan: “Short Cut to the Consumer . . . From Teats to Deetz to You.” Oregon’s big producers, who benefited from the law, started their own $100,000 campaign against repeal.

Last week Farmer Deetz, who also got himself elected to the State Legislature so he could help write a fairer milk law, was back on his farm wondering how to pay off his $4,000 mortgage. Said he: “I’m 60, and a man my age has got no business mortgaging the farm. But then I got no business going out of business either. All I want to do is make a living . . . and get my boy through school.”