Pass the Butter

Ezra Taft Benson faced up to the toughest decision he has had to make as Secretary of Agriculture. Ever since taking office, Benson has been preaching the need for getting the farmer out from under a rigged economy. Yet there, on his desk before him last week, lay the sorry facts about the butter industry. Butter is selling badly, and dairymen still have to pay support prices for feed. The question: Should he extend Government price supports, at 90% of parity, on butter for another year? Benson came to a reluctant decision: butter's props will be kept for the new crop year, commencing April 1.

One big reason why butter is in trouble is that legalized yellow oleomargarine, at less than half the price of butter, has pre-empted more than half the consumer market.* Many a postwar baby has never tasted butter. The Government, in order to keep its support pledge, has bought up the huge surplus supply of butter, now owns 88,623,288 lbs., worth nearly $60 million, and is now buying butter under the support plan at the rate of a million pounds a day. The U.S. buttery will continue to swell under the new Benson order. Some experts predict that federal butter holdings may climb to half a billion pounds by midsummer.

Some of the surplus will be donated to the federal school lunch program. The armed forces will be urged to buy some too. But these outlets will make only a tiny dent in the mountain of Government butter. Benson would like to see a vigorous campaign to get the public to drink more milk--before it becomes butter. But with the carefully protected high price of milk, such a program would be foredoomed too, unless the Government could somehow make milk cheaper by reducing the middleman's profits. And right there Secretary Benson would run afoul of private enterprise.

In the hope of coming up with a better solution before the new support year ends, Benson last week called a "work conference" of dairymen and Agriculture Department experts to study the whole problem. Unless they can find a real remedy, the dairy industry will continue to lean on the federal Government, and the U.S. taxpayer will still have to buy butter and watch it turn rancid in Government ware houses. Said Llewellyn Watts Jr., president of the New York Mercantile Exchange: "It's beginning to look like the dairy farmer stands a good chance of just about ceasing to do business with the consumer."

*Only five states--Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, South Dakota and Wisconsin--still restrict oleo to a lowly, uncolored, "table lard" form.

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