Unpatriotic Wheat

A full-dress patriotic campaign to keep farmers from'planting even the legal acreage of wheat was launched last week by Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard. He was too tactful to say that war has turned the 55,000,000-acre minimum allotment fixed by law into a white elephant (TIME, June 22), but what he did say was nonetheless plain English.

"In order to make his best contribution," said he, "every farmer should divert as much wheat land as practicable to crops more urgently needed . . . soybeans, flax and various feed crops." He told them that storing the colossal wheat surplus (tying up, among other things, thousands of bins made of precious steel) is already a terrible headache. He begged them to keep all the wheat they could on the farm and to market as much more as possible in the form of livestock and poultry.

During the next few months before all U.S. winter wheat gets planted, Mr. Wickard's plea will be supplemented by a rash of posters, radio plugs and personal exhortations from county agents to wheat planters. By fall the campaign may also be supported by some good, hard cash in the form of incentive prices (still undetermined) for crops like soybeans and flax that are sorely needed.

Wickard hopes his appeal to the farmers' patriotism may cut wheat planting by 15,000,000 acres. But the profit motive is working hard against him. The farm bloc has fixed the crop-loan law so that farmers can unload their wheat on the Government at $1.14 a bushel v. 98-c- last year and 65-c- the year before.

To U.S. farmers, that ain't hay.

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