FARMERS: No Thanks

In an expansive mood, the Department of Agriculture began two months ago a nationwide series of local meetings to let farmers know what it had in mind for their future welfare. While it was on the subject, it also asked for the farmers’ suggestions.

The department had wrapped up its own ideas in a book called the Family Farm Policy Review, which contained ample evidence of Agriculture’s ample generosity. In fiscal 1951, for example, it had $257,250,000 to pay out in rewards to farmers for making soil improvements alone. This fiscal year, said the report, could be even more bountiful. The report blithely suggested that the Department of Agriculture 1) spend more money this year on research, 2) hire more people, 3) look into such possibilities as acquiring and distributing land for bargain sale to farmers who want it.

By last week, the farmers’ suggestions were filtering back to Washington. If the returns from Michigan were any indication, the department seemed to be in for its roughest going since that summer day in 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt presented a medal to a Georgia farmer as the first man to plow his cotton under.

In the prosperous Republican farm towns of Goodells and Bad Axe, farmers turned out in their Sunday best to hear the report explained, and as soon as it was over, began biting the hand that subsidizes them, with heated protests against “Socialism” and Government “interference.” No one protested against interference in the form of price supports. It was outright subsidies for soil improvement—and the thought of the taxes they come from—that irked the solid farmers in Michigan’s bean-growing district.

“I can’t see any justification,” said Robert Meikle, who farms 200 acres, “for paying farmers for doing something they would normally do [e.g., liming the soil and laying drains]. Farming should be a respectable business with a respectable income for anyone who wants to work for it.” Said Robert Kestner, a prosperous farmer from Memphis: “I’m afraid of what’s to come. The Lord help us if we get a Socialist government. Why can’t the Government leave the farmers alone?”

Finally Wilbur Quick moved “that this Farm Policy Review be thrown out of this meeting.” The motion was unanimously supported by 200 farmers and their wives.