Relief Rebus

One disadvantage of being a Congressman is that you have to talk about one topic for months, years. On trains back to Washington last week, Congressmen were still talking, after a decade of it, about farm relief. Politically if not economically, something-must-be-done.

Economics. Insoluble though it seems, the economic aspect of the farm problem is simple. The only large variable involved is weather. If weather is good, so are crops. Too-big crops make too-small prices. If weather is bad, prices are good but many a farmer will have no crop to sell. Intelligent study of sound weather data will help stabilize his decision as to when to plant but the farmer still needs a gambler's instinct at planting time. And thereafter his fortune is in the lap of winds, rains, frosts.

Through his associations, the farmer is supposed to learn how much to plant so that there will not be a price-shrinking surplus. But most farmers are individualists. Far better than an association do they like a free-for-all, where every man raises as much as he can. Aid in marketing a surplus continues to interest most farmers more than laws of supply & demand.

Politics. Being a gambler, the farmer is a skeptic and like all skeptics he is willing to believe unpleasant things. Thus, for example, when politicians tell him, for their own purposes, that the tariff discriminates against him, he believes it. Were the politicians honest, they would say that the tariff favors manufacturers, which is very different. But instead of mere jealousy, the farmer has been made to feel that he suffers downright injury from the manufacturers' tariff. Similarly, ever since the Government fixed farm prices as a War measure, the farmer has been told, and he believes, there is no honest reason why the Government should not try to stabilize farm prices permanently. The Federal Reserve Board stabilizes the money market. Why should a Federal board not stabilize the food market? So asks the farmer, and threatens with a ballot the answerer who replies that food is less calculable than money.

Plans. The outstanding and controversial features of farm-relief plans have been, a) Federal price-bolstering and b) tariff adjustment. Plans currently urged contain these features as follows:

1) The Farm Bureau Federation clings to the equalization-fee of the aged McNary-Haugen Bill. By this plan, each farmer would pay some of his profits into a pot, held by the Government, from which farmers with losses would draw compensation. How to compute such losses? By having the Government fix "a fair price" for all crops each year. Farmers forced (by the presence of a crop surplus) to sell below the U. S. price, would be considered losers.

2) The National Grange and Senator Caraway of Arkansas want export debentures. The latter would be negotiable receipts issued by marketing agencies to farmers who market their crops abroad. Senator Caraway's suggestion is that the debentures should be used by the crop-exporters to buy imports duty-free, thus settling the tariff argument. The National Grange urges a tariff upon corn imported to the U. S. from South America.

3) Senator Borah and others have proposed that the U. S. determine the cost of U. S. crops, buy surpluses and market them abroad. This is subsidy.

What will come of these plans remains a political rebus. There probably are votes enough in Congress to pass a McNary-Haugen Bill again. There probably is enough spine in President Coolidge to veto such a bill again. President Coolidge has announced his own plan, which differs from McNary-Haugenism chiefly in omitting the equalization-fee and price fixing. The Administration favors establishing a Federal board to help the farmers market any surplus which may be "clearly due to weather and seasonal conditions," and a revolving loan fund for emergency financing.

Of all the experts with whom he has talked farm relief, none has interested President Coolidge more than the biggest farmer of them all. Not every farmer can be a big one, but President Coolidge may well have wished that all farmers were as clear-headed as Farmer Thomas Campbell of Montana, whom the President kept long after dinner at the White House lately (TIME, Dec. 5).

Farmer Campbell is to farming what Henry Ford was to motors. He cultivates 100,000 acres of wheat on dry benchlands in the Crow Indian Reservations near Hardin, Mont.* No other "bonanza" farm even approaches his in size though a few--notably the Adams and Grandin wheatlands in North Dakota, the Adams popcorn farms at Odebolt, Iowa, and the Allerton properties at Monticello, Ill.-- approximate his methods. To Farmer Campbell, "farming is the best business in the great industrial group and will soon get the dignity to which it is entitled." He handles his 100,000 ploughed acres the way a factory is handled--as an engineering proposition. Half the Campbell acres lie fallow each year. From the other half, some 500,000 bushels of wheat are produced by a fleet of machinery efficiently adapted and an army of men especially trained and disciplined. Efficiency is the rule and bonuses reward its promotion. All is studied, all calculated, from the pitch of a ploughshare to the cost of lubricating oil in the tractor that hauls the loaded wheat wagons to the fireproof bins (100,000 bu. capacity). Farmer Campbell, a lithe, steel-grey six-footer, son of a giant Scotch-Canadian lumberjack, trained for his "job" by crowding an academic and a mechanical engineering course into five years at the University of North Dakota--and running his father's Red River Valley farm at the same time. He then, aged 23, went to Cornell for a master engineer's degree.

As "biggest farmer," he is an authority on farm relief no less potent than the biggest steel man would be if there were a "steel relief" problem.

Biggest-Farmer Campbell's farm-relief suggestions, released by him last week, are as follows.

1)--Do not reduce industrial tariffs or wages, but extend tariff protection to the farm industry. Restrict immigration to protect all industry.

2)--Reduce farm taxes; adjust freight rates.

3)--Let farmers think more about economics, less about politics.

4)--Promote co-operative storage and use the selling machinery already set up instead of duplicating it.

5)--Teach farmers about boards of trade and marketing. Let the Government grade all crops and study carefully the regulation of crops delivered on future contracts.

6)--"Capital does not believe in farming." This attitude must be changed. Let businessmen study the farm problem.

7)--"All of these can be done without any new acts of Congress or the expenditure of large sums. Our present laws and flexible tariff can solve a great portion of the problem."

8)--"Most of all, however, farming must be industrialized . . . The biggest industrial opportunity today is in agriculture. The largest field for technical men today is in agricultural engineering. In less than 50 years we will have a U. S. Farming Corporation larger than the U. S. Steel . . . In 20 years less than 20% of our population will live on farms."*

* Leased to him through President Wilson and Secretary of the Interior Lane in 1918. His backing then was $2,000,000 from J. P. Morgan and other bankers. In 1921 he formed and incorporated the Campbell Farming Corp.

*At present 26% live on farms (1926 census).