Word from the Farm

In the halls of Chicago's Sherman Hotel, the 5,000 well-brushed, neatly tailored conventioneers looked as if they might have turned out for the annual convention of Kiwanis International. They were members of the solidest and biggest (1,623,222 families) farm organization in the U.S., the American Farm Bureau Federation. As expected, they talked mostly about one subject: the price problem back home. But what they said was quite different from what many politicians have been saying for them.

"My income is down 25% or 30% from last year," said Vernon McLeod, 33, who raises hogs, cattle, corn, wheat and oats on his 390 acres near Lyons, Mich. "But I'm not for 90% of parity. I'm for flexibility, something as close to supply and demand as you can get. I don't like artificial situations." Said Harold Umbaugh, 42, who has chickens, corn, wheat, oats, soybeans and hay on his 195 acres at New Paris, Ind.: "We farmers don't like to be on the dole. We like to make our own decisions. We ought to use price supports like brakes on a car, for emergencies."

Promissory Disaster. On the convention floor, the tone of the lobby talk was faithfully preserved. As their 163 voting delegates, Farm Bureau members had sent mostly stable, successful farmers in their late 40s or beyond, who have plowed and planted through the depths of depression and the peaks of prosperity. Their keynoter was Farm Bureau President Charles Baker Shuman, a corn, cattle and soybean farmer from Sullivan, Ill. Shuman complained that farmers have been caught in "a serious cost-price squeeze," but went on to praise U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson as "a very conscientious man who is doing as good as any man in his job can do under the circumstances."

Farmer Shuman blamed the old 90%-support program for producing trouble some surpluses, read a lecture to the politicians: "It is not only dangerous from the standpoint of agriculture to see who can promise the highest level of support, but I think it would be disastrous to the party that gets in power. The party committed to high, fixed supports would feel obligated to put them into effect, and that would result in farm income going down and surpluses continuing to accumulate."

From its resolutions committee, the convention got a proposal to reaffirm last year's stand in favor of Ezra Benson's flexible-support program. There was a lively but short-lived flurry of opposition from some Southern delegations, who wanted cotton, tobacco, wheat, rice and peanuts supported at a rigid 90% of parity. The vote was 124-39 for flexibility. Drawled E. H. Agnew, South Carolina cotton farmer who had helped lead the defeated Southerners: "It's like being a bastard at a family reunion and a skunk at a wedding reception."

Having settled that point, the convention pushed through a resolution calling for new Government action on the farm problem. Most of the plan centered on a land-rental and soil-bank proposal under which the Government would pay benefits to farmers who reduced their acreage of surplus commodities and planted soil-building crops instead. Into their plan the delegates wrote a new principle for reducing surpluses: payments to farmers who reduce their planting would be made in certificates entitling them to buy at reduced prices a supply of surplus crops stored in Government bins.

Preparing the Package. While the Farm Bureau was taking its stand, Ezra Benson was meeting in Washington with his National Agricultural Advisory Commission to draw the outlines of the Eisenhower Administration's 1956 farm legislative program. The plan will turn around the six points that Benson listed earlier (TIME, Dec. 12), including a soil bank. Benson was considering the Farm Bureau's certificate gimmick, but he had not decided whether to accept or reject it. (Secretary Benson last week announced a new plan designed to reduce the surpluses: he will give surplus wheat, corn, rice and dry beans to private welfare agencies for shipment abroad to help feed the hungry.)

As he filled his 1956 legislative package, Benson was trying to fit in an item to cover every situation. As of last week he favored a ceiling on the amount of Government support any farmer can get, a proposal that had a remarkable pair of recommendations from the left-of-center Farmers Union and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey. The Farmers Union sees it as a way to hold down the amount of U.S. funds going to big farmers, and George Humphrey sees it as a sensible protection for the Treasury.

After the legislative package is filled and tied, the Secretary of Agriculture plans to eat his way through a series of breakfasts with Congressmen, selling his plan between bites. While he is still clinging tightly to his principle of flexible price supports, Ezra Benson in 1956 will be aiming, far more than ever before, to please the farm politician and the farm voter.

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