AGRICULTURE: The Great Sorghum Game

One amazing feature of the Agriculture Department’s soil-bank program is its consistent tendency to build up farm surpluses instead of reduce them. Last week the newest example was sorghum, a flat leafed, long-stalked feed grain that means little to cityfolk. But it is a price-support gold mine to farmers, and a throbbing new headache to Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson.

This year the crop will be a whopper: 481 million bu., double last year’s. One reason is a new hybrid seed; another is better irrigation. But the biggest is a wide loophole in the soil-bank law which permitted U.S. farmers to plant more acres in sorghum than ever before and collect price supports on much of it.

Under the 1957 soil-bank law, any farmer who had 100 acres planted in wheat could put 25 acres into the soil bank and collect a payment for letting his land lie fallow, thus reducing the price-supported wheat crop. The law specifically prohibited him from planting those same acres with sorghum, also on the price-support list, in order to collect double payments. But the law said nothing about plowing up additional land not then under cultivation, and planting it with sorghum to make up the lost wheat acreage.

This is exactly what shrewd wheat farmers from Kansas to California did. Everyone joined the soil bank—and everyone piled on the sorghum. For the first time, the sorghum crop in Kansas was bigger than wheat—by 20 million bu. Result: with sorghum selling at $1.57 per cwt. on the free market and Government price supports at $1.83 per cwt., the U.S. will have to buy around 40% of the record crop at a cost of some $183 million in price supports. Then it will have to store the sorghum (if it can find space in wheat-filled granaries) at added expense until it can dispose of it.

Explaining the loophole. Agriculture could muster only a lame statement that it “did not want to regiment the U.S. farmer any more than necessary.” As usual, the Agriculture Department closed the barn-door-sized loophole after the Government till had been tapped. In the next crop year, farmers who put 25 acres into the soil bank will not get price supports on more than 75 acres of total crops. But few farmers are seriously worried. Though the great sorghum game is over, farmers are sure that when the time comes there will be plenty of other loopholes to shovel surpluses through.