AGRICULTURE: Garvey’s Gravy

Of all the harvesters of the U.S.’s scandalous farm subsidy program, none have harvested more profitably than a bulky (6 ft., 190 Ibs.), hearty Kansan named Ray Hugh Garvey. Wichita’s Garvey, 66, is a businessman of wide and wealth-producing interests: he controls a 500-well oil company (with a 27½% depletion allowance on federal corporate income taxes), a loo-house-a-year building firm (most with FHA-insured mortgages), a fuel-distribution company selling to farmers (who often use gas unstintingly because of a 2½-per-gallon rebate on federal taxes). But it is from his more direct agricultural interests that Ray Garvey and his big family (four children, 18 grandchildren) annually reap enough of the golden crop to stagger the imagination—and he does it without bending either the letter or the spirit of the nation’s farm support laws.

Just Peanuts. Trained as a lawyer (Washburn College in Topeka), Garvey gave up law practice in three years, was soon building a 100,000-acre wheat ‘and cattle empire. In 1947 he became the world’s No. i grower with a crop of close to 1,000,000 bushels. As any U.S. taxpayer should know, wheat is one of the basic commodities supported by the federal farm program—and in the last four years Garvey has received $791,488 in support loans for wheat he raised, plus $405,647 in cash from the federal soil bank program for the acreage he left idle. But all that wheat, and the wheat grown by other farmers, needs storing. And what Garvey makes out of growing wheat is peanuts compared to what he makes out of storing it.

In 1950 he had trouble leasing elevator space enough to store his own huge crop, decided that for so long as politicians insisted on Government subsidy programs, there was money to be made in the storage business. He began building skyscraping wheat bins from Nebraska to Texas, renting them to the U.S. for the surplus wheat it had bought. Garvey’s new C-G-F Grain Co. was aided by specific federal subsidy in the form of fast tax write-offs (five years), as good as any granted to defense-plant builders during Korean war mobilization.

Needless Worry. By last week, Garvey had just about finished this season’s additions to his private grain-storage kingdom, now the world’s biggest with a capacity of 150 million bushels. The U.S. Department of Agriculture pays him $14.7 million a year to store surplus wheat, corn and grain sorghums bought from his and other farms. Soon after the harvesting gets under way this month, the big 1959 crop will be piled on top of the two-year U.S. surplus already owned or under loan by the Agriculture Department (1.2 billion bushels).

So successful is Ray Garvey at the taxpayer’s expense that even he sometimes has his doubts. “We operate under the program,” he said last week. “We don’t set it.” He need not worry: the U.S. Congress, touting the farm subsidy program as a boon to the small farmer, still seems more than willing to go on making multimillionaires out of the Ray Hugh Garveys.