How To Succeed in Farming Without Creating a Mess

Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman once summed up U.S. agriculture as half miracle and half mess. The miracle is the wondrous surge of farm productivity over the past few decades. Since 1920, farm output per worker in the U.S. has not just doubled or tripled, but quadrupled. The mess is twofold. There is the problem of overproduction. Freeman's Agriculture Department spends about $7 billion a year, largely in hapless efforts to cope with farm surpluses. And there is the problem of rural poverty. The average farm-family income from farming, according to U.S. Government statistics, is less than $3,000 a year--considerably less than half the average for urban families.

In a just-published book entitled Farms and Farmers in an Urban Age, Agronomist Edward Higbee, a University of Rhode Island professor, takes a refreshingly clear-eyed look at the miracle and the mess. Sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund, the book cuts through the confusion of federal farm policy like a well-honed scythe leveling a weed patch.

The $217-a-Year Families. Much of the muddlement of U.S. farm policies, argues Higbee, results from statistical fallacies. As the Agriculture Department reckons it, any grower of crops or raiser of livestock who has at least ten acres of land and markets at least $50 worth of farm goods a year counts as a "farmer." But that term includes everybody from the Southern mill hand who grows a field of cotton as a sideline, netting $70 a year on ten acres, to the Southwestern cotton baron who manages his empire from an air-conditioned office, netting $65,000 a year on 1,000 acres. The Agriculture Department offers the mill hand and the baron the same support price on their cotton. A farm policy that treats rich farmers, poor farmers and part-time farmers as if they had the same problems and the same need for Government help is detached from reality, Higbee argues.

In the last "census of agriculture," taken in 1959 by the Census Bureau, 44% of those classified as farmers marketed less than $2,500 worth of farm goods a year. These families, whose poverty is often cited as a reason why federal farm subsidies must be continued, are not really farmers at all by any sensible criterion. Their net family income from agriculture averaged $217 a year. Their nonfarm income came to $2,884 per family. Counting them as farmers, and including their $217 a year in the national farm income averages, distorts and muddles federal farm policy. "These people," urges Professor Higbee, "should not be seriously considered when farm policy is debated and formulated."

It Takes More Than Work. The rural poor, says Higbee, cannot hope to prosper as farmers, because they do not have and cannot get enough capital. The spectacular rise in farm productivity in recent decades has resulted from a combination of improved technology and heavy capital investment. An ever increasing share of total U.S. farm output is produced on big, heavily capitalized farms. The top 9% of the farms account for 50% of total farm production. The top 3% of the farms produce as much as the bottom 80%. Large-scale farmers make exceedingly good livings--not from handling plows and pitchforks energetically, but from managing capital effectively.

Farmers who lack capital, and the credit or imagination to borrow it, cannot make a U.S.-style living out of farming. What they put into farming is primarily their own labor, and farm labor is low-paid, averaging 84-c- an hour, less than one-third of factory wages. "When I'm on my tractor," says an Ohio corn-hog farmer with a $300,000 farm, "I'm worth no more than my hired hand."

Risk-Free Profit. The U.S. Government's price-support system, Higbee argues, is grotesquely ill-designed to cope with the problems it is supposed to remedy--overproduction and rural poverty. A support price that is high enough to cover the production costs of a small-scale, inefficient farmer provides a glorious opportunity for risk-free profit to the large-scale, efficient farmer with his much lower costs of production per bushel or bale. The support price of corn, for example, is $1.25 a bushel, and the big producer can grow corn for less than 70-c- a bushel. Clearly, if the Government takes the stuff off his hands at $1.25, the efficient farmer can reap a bumper crop of money from growing corn that nobody needs.

For small-scale farmers with little capital, price supports provide only meager help. The less a farmer produces, the less he gets from price supports. "Most of the help," says Higbee, "goes to a relatively small percentage of upper-bracket operators who are better off than the majority of taxpayers."

Higbee urges that price supports "be discontinued in favor of letting free enterprise determine price." Abolition of price supports would slow down the expansion of large-scale farming and thereby delay the obsolescence of the medium-scale farmers. As for the small-scale farmers, already economically obsolete, there is only one "real solution," argues Higbee: "More city jobs."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.