AGRICULTURE: Thorn of Plenty

Next to waging the cold war and preventing a hot one, the most gruesome task confronting the U.S. Government is coping with the farm-glut scandal. Swollen by the costs of buying and storing farm surpluses—largely created by obsolete federal price supports—Agriculture Department spending will mount this fiscal year to $6.9 billion, more than twice the combined outlays of the State, Justice, Interior, Commerce and Labor Departments.

The surplus wheat, corn, cotton, cheese, etc., in federal storage adds up to such fantastic bulk that it costs nearly $1 billion a year just to store the stuff while it slowly deteriorates. And the costs threaten to climb higher as farm output keeps rising. Last week the Agriculture Department reported that, though planted acreage was the smallest since 1918, the U.S.’s total 1958 crop output topped by a startling 11% the previous record highs of 1948, 1956 and 1957. For wheat and corn, already in generous oversupply, farmers set new yield-per-acre records.

The vastness of the federal farm problem at year’s end measures the failure of the hopes and promises that Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson brought with him to Washington nearly six years ago—and no one knows it better than Ezra Benson. In a speech last week in Los Angeles, like the legendary sorcerer’s apprentice, he all but pushed the panic button in warning that the runaway price-support programs for wheat, tobacco and peanuts “might soon become disastrous.” Said he: “We must complete our revision of the farm programs without delay.”

Benson has been the victim of a farm-productivity revolution, the combined workings of improved fertilizers, more and bigger farm machinery, deadlier pesticides and higher-yielding hybrid plants. But even his friends have begun to wonder whether he may have hindered rather than helped his announced aims. He justly carps at Capitol Hill’s farm-vote-minded refusal to grant him all the support-shrinking powers he has asked for (“Our recommended program has never been given a real try”), but he has not always used the powers that he has to limit price supports, e.g., he voluntarily provided generous Government price support for millions of bushels of corn raised outside his acreage-restriction programs. And he has muddied debate by underwriting such feeble steps as 1956’s since-discarded acreage-reserve provisions of the soil bank and his new, too-little, too-late corn program, which, by abandoning production curbs in return for a very modest decrease in corn price supports, threatens to bring on a bigger corn glut than ever.

“The trouble with Benson,” said a ranking Agriculture Department officer last week, “has been that he talks as if he were the master of the problem, when actually he has been the slave of it.” But whatever marks Benson deserves for his six-year effort, it is inescapably obvious that he is correct in his blunt demands for a new farm program to replace the depression-vintage, price-support apparatus, which operates like the unstoppable sorcerer’s apprentice’s broom—to make worse the problem it was designed to cure.