AGRICULTURE: Pop Goes Corn

Ever since the election, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson had looked forward to smooth plowing for his soil-bank program. He needed to rally the corn farmers to the program with more enthusiasm. And to do this, he was prepared to allocate considerably more acreage to the cornmen—though with a lower support price ($1.31 v. $1.36 a bu.)—if only the farmers would renounce the surplus-building system of the old acreage-allotment plan. Last week corn farmers put Benson’s new plan to a vote. Result: in the 894 commercial corn counties in the U.S., cornmen stubbornly failed to give him the necessary two-thirds approval; 257,874 cast for the new proposal, 163,227 against.

The news was a shock. Benson worried that his whole soil bank might now suffer because—among other reasons—multi-crop farmers who decline to comply with acreage restrictions on one crop, e.g., corn, are not eligible for soil-bank payments on other crops, e.g., wheat, peanuts, cotton. What to do? The Agriculture Department probably will ask Congress to enact in legislation the plan that failed to win the two-thirds majority. Since 61% of the farmers actually voted for his plan, Ezra Benson feels that equity is on his side. He hopes that Congress will feel the same, but before he finds out for sure, Washington can look forward to another blazing Capitol Hill go-around between the Bensonites and the diehard defenders of the oldtime system of high-price supports.