Agriculture: How to Shoot Santa Claus

AGRICULTURE

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Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together. —Gulliver’s Travels

“Thunderation!” he muttered indignantly, as the Illinois Central’s crack Panama Limited slowed for a laggard signal. From his starched collar to his shiny black shoes, the stocky, craggy-faced passenger was obviously a farmer returning from the city, impatient to see how many inches the corn had grown in his absence, begrudging every precious second of daylight lost in transit. Finally, 172 miles and 155 minutes out of Chicago, the train glided to a halt at Mattoon, III., and the fretful passenger hopped off.

Half an hour later, Charles Baker Shuman was standing in a jungle of cornstalks that towered four feet above his 5-ft. 11½-in. frame, and would tickle a 20/20 elephant eye. Beyond the corn, a new crop of tomatoes was ripening; the cattle were fattening nicely; the flower garden was a colorplate right out of Burpee’s seed catalogue. For Farmer Shuman, walking the rich brown soil and caressing its bounty last weekend, God was in his heaven—even if all, as usual, was far from right with the world.

Standing in the fields at dusk in his faded blue denim coveralls, Charlie Shuman draws new strength from his ally, the earth. His adversary for most of his 58 years has been the agricultural bureaucracy in Washington, which Shuman regards as a kind of socialistic Santa Claus engaged in a monstrous plot to make the nation’s farmers live off “sugarplum subsidies” rather than the honest fruits of the soil. Unfashionably, by today’s standards, Shuman distrusts government in any form, spurns its handouts. “Farming’s Freedom Fighter,” as he is often called, Shuman is president of the 1,647,455-member American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest and most influential general farm organization.

Lost Prototype. Shuman and the Farm Bureau want far more than greater freedom or higher prices for the farmers. Essential to their philosophy is a dream of restoring the U.S. farmer’s lost image as the prototypical American, the sturdy pioneer who fed the nation’s body and nourished its spirit with his fierce independence, his self-reliance, his courage. It is an image that burns brightly in the American imagination, an ideal rooted in the precepts of Jeffersonian democracy and articulated in the economics of Adam Smith—and it is sadly lacking on the U.S. scene today. Dour, plainspoken Charlie Shuman is himself a prototype of that image. “I’m an American conservative,” he says with pride. As such, Shuman abominates the whole diabolic concatenation of controls and subsidies that is making the U.S. farmer “a member of a permanently subsidized peasantry.”

Some peasantry! The American farmer is the nation’s biggest industry, owns assets totaling $230 billion, which equals two-thirds of the value of all U.S. corporations, three-fifths of the market value of all corporate stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Each year he spends $3.1 billion for new tractors, trucks, machinery and equipment; $3.3 billion for fuel, oil and maintenance; $1.6 billion for fertilizer. Moreover, as a grower, consumer and notoriously tetchy voter, the U.S. farmer today is a rough-knuckled realist. Yet he has a wide streak of idealism. Those who, like Shuman, decry federal management of agriculture, do so in part with the prideful assurance that every attempt to keep the U.S. farmer from growing more food is doomed to failure. Today, thanks to revolutionized technology, the man who can make two ears of corn grow where one did before knows well that tomorrow there will be three—or four.

Flood Tide of Plenty. That lesson has never been more conclusively demonstrated than in the summer of 1965. This month and next, despite three decades of heroic federal efforts to limit the land’s insistent bounty, farmers from ocean to ocean and border to border will harvest the largest crop in the nation’s history—1.4 billion bu. of wheat, up 7% from last year; 4.1 billion bu. of corn, up 15% ; 961 million bu. of oats, up 9% ; 624 million bu. of grain sorghum, up 27% ; 120 million tons of hay, up 3% ; 864 million bu. of soybeans, up 23%.

Such a flood tide of plenty is enough to feed and clothe half the world—and, under the Food for Peace Program, $1.7 billion worth will, in fact, find its way to some 100 million people, provide school lunches for 40 million schoolchildren, help stave off famine and political unrest the world over. The residue, added to the nation’s vast stockpile of surplus commodities, will merely compound what urban Americans have long accepted as “the farm mess.”

“Crazy Quilt.” Squirreled away in silos and warehouses, the mess is worth $6.8 billion, consists of 795 million bu. of wheat, 1.2 billion bu. of corn, 640 million bu. of grain sorghum, 12 million bales of cotton and 1.1 billion Ibs. of tobacco. Though it has shrunk somewhat as a result of Food for Peace shipments, this vast reserve costs $365 million a year merely to store, and threatens to expand again as a result of this year’s mighty harvest—which Agriculture Department officials view as an unmitigated disaster.

The greater disaster, of course, has been the almost total failure of bureaucrats, economists and politicians to anticipate and control the ever-rising productivity of the U.S. farmer. “Why don’t they leave us alone?” cries Shuman. “Why don’t they get out and let the farmers run their own business?” By “they” he means Congress, the army of Government farm experts commanded by Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, and what Shuman calls the “crazy-quilt patchwork of stopgap farm programs”—all hopelessly complex, all composted of political expediency, and all, in Shuman’s view, a complete failure.

The symptoms have been visible for decades. In the past 50 years, agriculture has advanced faster and farther in the U.S. than in any other country in the entire previous history of the world. Today, one man-hour of farm labor yields more than five times as much food as it did in 1920. Crop production is 70% higher per acre; output per breeding animal has doubled. The productivity of the U.S. farm worker has shot up 7.7% since the 1950s, compared with only a 2.8% rise for industrial workers. The farm worker who fed twelve people in 1945 feeds 32 today.

The technological revolution that made this possible came in four stages: 1) the mechanical era that substituted horsepower for horses, and continues today; 2) chemical breakthroughs in fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides that largely eliminated hand-labor; 3) biological improvements in plant and animal strains; 4) the managerial phase, which promises even greater future gains from the use of computers to plot every facet of farm life.

In the brave new world of U.S. agriculture, Shuman’s solution for the U.S. farm problem is perhaps too simple and old fashioned. He wants the Government to phase out price supports, notch by notch, over an extended period. In addition, Shuman would retire from 50 to 70 million acres of cropland as a way of reducing production and keeping prices firm. Says a less venturesome farm official: “Charlie has a religion that a free market is the only right way to deal with agriculture. I don’t think he fully understands it. His creed is the oldtime Methodism: work hard, save your money and everything will turn out right.” Indeed, Secretary Freeman argues that abolition of Government commodity programs and a return to the free market “would mean instant disaster for much of agriculture.”

18¢ Tears. Studies by non-Government economists at Iowa State, Oklahoma State, Cornell and Pennsylvania Siate back him up. Their findings: 1) net farm income, now running about $12.6 billion a year, would fall 40% to 50%; 2) farm prices would drop 25% to 30%, livestock prices would fall 10% to 20%; 3) two-thirds of the U.S.’s 437,000 farmers who sell goods worth more than $20,000 a year would be wiped out. “This situation,” said Freeman, “would not only bankrupt most farmers; it would mean economic and social ruin for most of rural America and a serious economic setback for the whole nation.”

Even as things are, farmers argue, they have been badly hurt by the widening gap between the prices they get for their crops and the cost of food at the supermarket counter. A recent Government study of the $36.7 billion worth of crops and livestock sold by farmers in 1964 showed that they averaged only 37¢ on the dollar. The grower receives 2.5¢ for the corn in a 29¢ box of cornflakes, 2.5¢ for the wheat in a 21¢ loaf of white bread, 25¢ for the cotton in a $4 shirt. The farmer’s share of the take has declined 15% in 20 years, and is still going down.

For her part, the housewife spends only 18.5% of her husband’s take-home pay for food, and is giving her family more variety, more nourishment, and higher-quality meals than are eaten anywhere else on earth. Still, her shopping trip tends to be a traumatic experience. Chicago Housewife Diane Kroll groaned: “At these prices, you have to be rich to afford an ulcer.” Adds Roberta Pearson, a Chicago mother of three: “When you only get three small onions for 18¢, you don’t have to grate them to get tears in your eyes.”

All but Pre-Eaten. Despite housewives’ tears, the price of food in recent years has actually risen less than the prices of most other items in the cost-of-living index. And, in a way, the housewife has only herself to blame for supermarket shock. No longer willing to grate cheese, shell peas or roll pastry, she demands premixed, pre-podded—all but pre-eaten—food that takes a minimum of kitchen time and costs more to process.

The average city dweller, who pays plenty in taxes for farm programs, also —and unfairly—blames evaporating household budgets on the farmer. Yet, protests Shuman, “consumers are being asked to add $300 million to their grocery bills for a farm program that farmers do not want.” By that, he means the Agricultural Act of 1965—the farm bill—which cleared the House two weeks ago and is now before the Senate Agriculture Committee. The chairman, Lousiana Democrat Allen Ellender, is aghast at the rising cost of Government farm programs and the ever-increasing surpluses, appears grimly determined to do something about it this time.

62½. Hardly anyone denies that the farm program is riddled with inconsistencies, inequities and absurdities. A farmer in Minnesota, who recently rented 300 acres of grassland, simply turned around and put it into the feed grain program’s acreage diversion plan, which pays the farmer 62½ for every bushel of corn he does not grow but reasonably might have. Thus, without so much as sinking a spade in his earth, the farmer made a clear profit of more than $8,000. “And, besides,” he noted accurately, “I can graze that rented land after October 1.”

By far the biggest inequity is that those who need subsidies the least get the most. The Department of Agriculture estimates that one-third of its $3 billion-a-year expenditures for farm price supports and related programs goes to fewer than 100,000 larger farms. One suggested remedy would be to lower price supports for commodities and augment them with cash payments that would decrease in proportion to the volume of the commodity produced by any one farmer.

Charlie Shuman hoped at first that Rancher Lyndon Johnson would propose such bold departures. And, in fact, the President’s State of the Union message promised “new approaches” to the whole agricultural problem. But Shuman was soon convinced that “L.B.J. wants a socialized agriculture.” Why the disenchantment? In the interim, the Administration has sent a farm bill to Congress that, to Shuman’s way of thinking, contains “nothing that is an improvement over the current law.”

Shuman’s disappointment was even keener because he felt that Johnson was throwing away a rare opportunity to move toward a freer market. His reasoning: the record 1965 crop was already a virtual certainty, and only proved again that the present control system was unworkable in reducing production. Thus, he figured, Johnson could afford to experiment with fewer controls and if it did not work out, could not be held accountable at the polls for not having made an honest effort to solve the farm problem.

With his overwhelming popular mandate and his awesome power over Congress, Lyndon Johnson was given—and passed up—a historic opportunity to reform and redirect the farm program.

The Bill. Instead, as passed by the House, the Administration bill would extend the program for four years—the longest life of any omnibus farm bill in U.S. legislative history. Its provisions essentially are little changed from previous programs, with the exception of an additional 50¢-a-bu. subsidy for wheat, raising the support price to $2.50 for wheat grown for domestic consumption, and a new cropland retirement plan under which the Agriculture Secretary may draw up five-and ten-year contracts with farmers to fallow single fields or whole farms.

Secretary Freeman, a congenital optimist, has high hopes for the bill’s long-range effects. If it is passed by the Senate as a four-year program, he says, “by 1970 we’ll have Agriculture’s house in order.” Not likely, says Shuman. “It is bad legislation,” he maintains. “From the standpoint of farmers, this complicated monstrosity won’t increase income. It will simply increase the dependence of farmers on an annual dole of payments and subsidies from Congress.”

The Farm Bureau argues that acreage allotments for wheat and feed grains should be dropped, that support prices should be pegged to the equivalent of the average world market price for the past three years (for wheat, $1.38 a bushel; for corn, $1), and that the Government should be prohibited from selling its surplus stocks at less than 125% of the support price, allowing the market price to rise above the support level. The Bureau even faults the new cropland retirement plan, though that has long been one of the organization’s pet schemes for whittling down surpluses. “It can’t possibly work satisfactorily,” Shuman believes.

On F.D.R.s Lap. In scope and philosophy, Charlie Shuman’s outfit today has little in common with the Farm Bureau that set out 45 years ago as a “wedding of corn and cotton”—meaning farm interests of the Middle West and the South. In the dire early days of the New Deal, when the bottom had dropped out of farming, the Farm Bureau cheered virtually every program it now condemns. It sat on Franklin Roosevelt’s lap, busily buried pigs for Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace —even had a loose alliance with labor (in exchange for labor’s support of farm programs). By the late 1930s, its ardor for the New Deal had cooled, and with the start of World War II the Farm Bureau’s break with the Roosevelt Administration was com plete. In 1947, the election of Iowa Corn and Hog Farmer Allen Kline as president signaled the organization’s move to the right. “Kline brought us to look at the economic issues in agriculture,” Shuman explains. “His administration said, ‘We want less government, not more.’ It was a simple change, but pretty fundamental. I can’t claim credit for that. If I can claim any credit, it is that I stuck with it.”

What Shuman can claim overwhelming credit for is the defeat of the 1963 nationwide wheat referendum, which shook the Kennedy Administration to its socks. It was the Gettysburg of the war between farmer and bureaucrat—and Shuman was its General Meade. The referendum’s Robert E. Lee was Willard Cochrane, then Freeman’s director of agricultural economics, a tough-minded theoretician whose ideas proved politically unacceptable.

Farmers were asked to vote between a $2-a-bu. support price coupled with strict, mandatory quantitative controls (Cochrane’s plan) or no program at all —and, warned Freeman, “$1 wheat.” Shuman fired the opening shot at a Farm Bureau convention in Atlanta before the referendum, said that Washington seemed “determined to either rule or ruin American agriculture.” Who, he asked, “will run the farms of America? Will it be the farmers or political bureaucrats?” The clincher was his down-to-earth reminder that with an election coming up, the Administration could hardly afford to let wheat prices fall to $1 a bushel. The farmers took Shuman at his word and resoundingly defeated the plan. Ten months later, Congress passed a voluntary program with the $2 support price.

Like Greece. The U.S. farming community, never noted for consistency, today embraces almost as many splinter groups as the Greek Parliament. The Farm Bureau’s biggest and noisiest rival, the Denver-headquartered National Farmers Union, is at the opposite end of the ideological and political spectrum. Headed since 1940 by Kansas-born Jim Patton, 62, Farmers Union has 750,000 members, strongly supports the Government’s hand on the plow. Says Patton, whose favorite pastime is taking pokes at the Farm Bureau: “What Charlie Shuman doesn’t realize is that we’ve got the welfare state and we’ve had it for 30 years. And we’re not going to give it up unless we lose the ballot box.”

Between the Farm Bureau on the right and the Farmers Union on the left stands the granddaddy of all U.S. farm organizations, the 98-year-old National Grange, with 800,000 members. Master of the Grange is Indiana-born Herschel D. Newsom, 65, a roly-poly Quaker and lifelong Republican, who believes that “government has a proper role in agriculture.”

Newest and brashest of all is the militant National Farmers Organization. Headquartered in Corning, Iowa, N.F.O. opposes Government farm programs as vociferously as the Farm Bureau; on other matters it is even farther to the right. Under President Oren Lee Staley, 42, N.F.O. (estimated membership: 200,000 in 25 states) maintains that the only workable approach to the farm problem is to control the flow of supplies to market. Staley claims that contracts with six of the nation’s 15 major hog processors are now in effect, and that grain marketing is next on the agenda.

Father Worked, Mother Did. The Farm Bureau’s many critics claim that Shuman’s homespun ways are an affectation—that he actually rehearses his rusticity. “It takes a lot of practice for a girl to kiss like an amateur,” sniffs one acquaintance. In Charlie Shuman’s case, naturalness comes naturally.

A bona fide son of the Moultrie County soil his family has farmed since 1853, Shuman has deep roots in the fertile farmland around Sullivan (pop. 4,000). The nucleus of the present Shuman farm has been in the family for 112 years. Great-Grandfather Charles Shuman was a Bavarian shoemaker who immigrated to the U.S. in 1835, changed the spelling of his last name from Schumann (“to Americanize it,” says Charlie), and settled in Philadelphia. His son, also Charles, grew up and headed West to seek his fortune. When he got to Sullivan, he ran out of money, went to work as a hired hand on the farm of Major Addison McPheeters, a Scots settler who won his spurs in the Black Hawk War. Before long, Charles Shuman married the major’s daughter Mary and took over the farm. They had three children, one of whom was Bliss, Charlie Shuman’s father.

“My mother was the doer of the family,” Shuman recalls. “My father just worked hard.” One of three children, Shuman grew up on the farm, drove a horse and buggy the four miles into Sullivan to high school. He graduated with honors from the University of Illinois College of Agriculture at Urbana in 1928, went back next year to take a master’s degree in agronomy. Then, with a $4,000 bank loan and a hired hand, he started farming by renting his father’s land. They were hard years for farmers, but Shuman got by.

Onward & Upward. In 1933 Shuman married Ida Wilson, an Indiana-born math teacher. By that time, he was climbing the ladder in the Farm Bureau, which he joined in 1929. By 1945 he was the $7,500-a-year president of the statewide Farm Bureau. Its offices were in Chicago, but Shuman decided it was best for his four children to grow up on the farm. After nine years, Shuman moved into the top spot of the national organization in 1954. Ida, whom he credits with having provided much of his drive, died four months before his election.

A year after he became Farm Bureau president. Shuman was making his regular weekend trip home on the Panama Limited, and sat down in the dining car next to a grey-eyed blonde. The train lurched, the blonde headed for the floor, and Charlie caught her. They got to talking. Romance blossomed. She was Mabel Ervin, a farm girl from 90 miles north of Sullivan who was working as a legal secretary in Chicago and was also headed home for the weekend. They were married a year later, have a son, Freedom Fighter (j.g.) George, 8, a carbon copy of his father.

Everything in the Catalogue. For Charlie, their eight-room, 55-year-old farm home is a weekend haven of peace and quiet. When he gets home from Chicago on Friday nights and dons his old clothes, Shuman goes out to look over the crops or attack the weeds that infest the vegetable garden behind the house. He grows nearly every fruit and vegetable* in the seed catalogue. Mabel, who can hardly use one-fifth of what he grows, has a surplus problem of her own. She has a big freezer and a cellar room for her preserves, but the bounty from Charlie’s garden overflows both.

Shuman believes that “it’s important for a fellow to keep his ability to communicate with farmers,” makes a point each Saturday of going into town on errands and “talking to fellows who’ve come in, just like me. It restores me.” If the weather and the season are right, he and George go fishing for bluegills on a lake on the farm, and on Saturday nights they sit in the comfortable Shuman parlor and watch Gunsmoke and Charlie’s perennial favorite, Lawrence Welk.

Sunday church is an all-family affair. On one recent Sunday at Sullivan’s Methodist Church, the ushers were Charlie, Sons Charles, John and Son-in-Law Roger Roney; Daughter-in-Law Mary played the organ. Until recently, Mabel was the church’s membership secretary, and Daughter Janet often sings in the choir. Shuman teaches Sunday school after the service, as he has for 25 years.

A large part of Shuman’s weekend is spent looking over the 1,013-acre mixed farm (corn, wheat, hogs, Aberdeen-Angus beef cattle) that Shuman owns in partnership with his three older sons. Like father, like sons. The Shuman boys are hotly against government in agriculture. “I don’t see why the Federal Government should support me,” said Charles. “Dad wouldn’t accept a green check—from the Government—and neither would we.”† Weekend over, Mabel drives Charlie back to Mattoon on Monday morning in time to catch the 7:06 back to Chicago—and the thick of battle.

Riling the Folks. Shuman likes to characterize his administration as “plodding, hardworking, do-what-you-have-to -do -to -meet -the – problems-as -they-come.” Said he: “Kline inspired people more than I can. He had the ability to excite people.” Some Shuman watchers would testify that Charlie can get people excited—and riled—pretty easily himself. Last year, in Philadelphia, Shuman got plenty of mileage out of comparing the Government support programs to narcotics.

“I think Government payments have something in common with the narcotics habit,” he said. “Once on the habit, the victim becomes convinced he cannot live without the drug. In the jargon of the underworld, he’s hooked. He’ll do most anything to get his next fix, his next check. The pushers, in this case the Government bureaucrats and committees, constantly work to get more farmers hooked. The more that are hooked, the more the payments are, and the more assurance of their jobs and the perpetuation of the machine in power. Well, that’s the way of socialism.” The delegates roared their approval.

At a Farm Bureau meeting some years ago, he thundered that the federal farm program “denies the unmistakable pattern of God’s law.” On hearing about Shuman’s remark, National Farmers Union President Patton retorted: “This is Shuman’s arrogant attempt to make God a member of Farm Bureau.” Given the chance, Shuman might try. The Farm Bureau is a way of life to him, and his commitment is wholehearted. Says he: “It’s going to take complete and total sacrifice in the Farm Bureau if we’re going to accomplish our objectives.”

With the diverse interests of the organization’s members—from Maine potato growers to Florida citrus farmers, California orchardists to Wisconsin dairymen, and hog, peanut, cotton, livestock, wheat, rice and corn growers scattered in between—it is a wonder that Shuman is able to make a coherent presentation on anything. Yet surveys by farm magazines show that a majority of the Farm Bureau’s members approve of the organization’s policies as articulated by Shuman.

Parsimonious Tipper. Shuman’s job entails traveling some 75,000 miles a year. In the first half of 1965, he has been in the Chicago office only 58 days, made a total of 61 speeches in 22 states. In Chicago, Shuman stays at the Sherman Hotel, where he gets a special rate and a different room each week. After 20 years, Shuman and the Sherman’s bellboys have become special friends, though Shuman is a notoriously parsimonious tipper. “I don’t throw it around,” he says.

For all his rusticity, Shuman is no rube. He is as well-known in the halls of Congress as he is on the courthouse square in Sullivan. Recently, when Shuman showed up on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Agriculture Committee on the 1965 farm bill, it was like old home week. “Hello, Charlie,” called Committee Chairman Allen Ellender as Shuman walked in. “How are you, Charlie?” inquired Vermont Republican George Aiken. Shuman has a reputation for having facts at his fingertips and needing no assistance when he has something to say. When Louisiana’s Ellender offered to let several Farm Bureau aides join Shuman at the committee’s table, Shuman replied: “If you want to. Just so they don’t bother me.”

At 58, Shuman is about as chipper as any of his Aberdeen-Angus calves. He neither smokes nor drinks (“I’m not a teetotaler,” he says, “I don’t want the stimulation”), and strives mightily to refrain from cussing.

Crisis in the Making. Fortunately, Shuman’s blood pressure is low, for there is little likelihood that the farm mess will be solved in the near future. Any substantial answer lies elusively between the extremes represented by Charles Shuman and Willard Cochrane. The Shuman Farm Bureau approach, calling for complete freedom in the marketplace, strikes a deep emotional chord but runs head-on into economic and political difficulties. Cochrane’s solution, a farmer-proof system of mandatory production controls, defies the character and political power of the farmer.

The farmer’s shadow still looms large on Capitol Hill. However, there are signs that an increasingly urbanized America is losing patience with ever-mounting subsidies and surpluses. The political influence of the farmer has already declined. Thus, barring war or prolonged general drought, reasons Cochrane, “increased agricultural productivity is going to drive farm program costs, under voluntary control programs, into direct collision with the budget limitation objectives of the urban voter within the next three to ten years. A crisis in commercial farm policy is in the making.”

Obviously, in a free society, farmers cannot be forcibly herded off the land —though former Budget Director Kermit Gordon has estimated that there are upwards of 2.5 million farmers who “do not now and cannot in the fu ture be expected to operate successful commercial farms.” In any case, while the number of farms and of people living on farms in the U.S. has already declined by one third since 1955, surpluses continue to pile up.

The U.S. can no longer rely on global giveaways as an open-end solution for surpluses. For all its good intentions, the Food for Peace Program cannot be greatly expanded without running into serious economic and political problems about world commodity prices; as it is, the U.S. is accused of “dumping” surpluses on nations that would go hungry without them. Moreover, most countries receiving this aid, such as India, which took 20% of the entire U.S. grain crop last year—and needed more—are unable to import available grain for lack of handling and storage facilities.

One promising outlet for surpluses is through increased commercial sales abroad. Of the $6.2 billion worth of farm products that the U.S. sent abroad last year, $4.6 million was through normal export channels. The future of U.S. sales to Common Market countries ($1.4 billion in 1964) is threatened by the community’s drift toward protective tariffs. But Europe is not the whole world; as other nations improve their diets and elevate their tastes, they may open huge new markets for U.S. farm products. Even so, they could absorb only a fraction of the 5 to 10% year-in, year-out overproduction of U.S. agriculture.

Overproduction may one day become a virtue, for in the view of many experts, large areas of the world are faced with famine in the next decade. Within ten years or less, Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal predicts, the world will need every shred of food and fiber the U.S. can grow. “If I am right, and I’m afraid I am,” he said, “very much more food will be urgently needed within a short time to avert world calamity.” The challenge to the U.S. is to devise new and constructive ways to harness overproduction, to make Godsent abundance a blessing, not a curse.

For the next decade, at least, the logical solution to the farm problem —if logic is ever applied to it—may well lie in a slow, carefully phased, commodity-by-commodity lowering of price supports. At the same time, the Great Society should be able to afford a larger share of its anti-poverty funds for rural America, to provide jobs and training programs so that those who prefer to stay on the land are not forced into the cities. All this, coupled with direct, market-price purchases of commodities for the Food for Peace Program by the Government—rather than siphoning off surplus stocks—and the realistic prospect of greatly increased demand for U.S. farm products around the world, should in time assure farmers a better standard of living than they now enjoy, and a more rewarding way of life than growing—or not growing—food for Washington.

When that day comes, Charlie Shuman will gladly give up his job, get on the Panama Limited and go back to Moultrie County for good.

* Among them: onions, okra, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, kohlrabi, carrots, beets, tomatoes, rhubarb, sweet corn, potatoes, turnips, snap beans, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, sweet potatoes, musk melon, watermelon, strawberries, raspberries, eggplant, pumpkin, Brussels sprouts, parsley.

† Shuman confesses that he participated in a federal wheat allotment program in 1933, stayed in it about five years, but has “not been in programs since.”