How to Fight a Hydra

The seven-headed Hydra of Greek mythology was a tough monster to be up against: every time a head was cut off, two more promptly grew in its place.* Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson sometimes feels as harried and frustrated as a man trying to kill a Hydra. Under Benson, as under his Democratic predecessors, farm surpluses have kept right on piling up, and the nation's yearly price-support bill has kept getting bigger.

Four-State Experiment. Benson's 1956 soil bank plan was supposed to cut farm production, but after an expenditure of $61 million, out popped the new heads: while letting a farmer bank part of his land, it left him free to boost output on the unbanked acres, and surpluses set new records. Last week Benson announced a new plan that might at least keep the struggle even: get entire farms out of crop production. Beginning right away, he said, the Agriculture Department will let farmers in four scattered test states--Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, Tennessee--submit land-rental bids. When a bid is accepted by the Agriculture Department, the farm's entire crop acreage will be put into grasses or other conservation covers for a minimum of five years. Maximum rental on any one farm: $10.000. If the bid experiment works out satisfactorily over the next several weeks, Benson said, he will extend the plan to other states next year.

The whole-farm-retirement idea made sound sense to the U.S.'s biggest farmer organization, the 1,600,000-member American Farm Bureau Federation. Meeting in Chicago last week, the A.F.B.F. called for a "special effort" by the Government to get whole farms into a long-term conservation reserve. Benson's new approach also made sense, as a step in the right direction, to the respected Committee for Economic Development, a private organization of high-level businessmen and educators. In a thoughtful farm-policy study released last week, C.E.D. argued that it would be cheaper for the Government to rent farm land than to buy and store surplus crops, because the crop price not only covers land rental but also the costs of labor, equipment, fertilizer, etc.

Costly Flop. As "nonprofit, non-partisan and nonpolitical" C.E.D. sees it, the basic farm-policy difficulty is that too many people in the U.S. are trying to make a living at farming. Farm productivity has soared so fast over the past two decades that despite a steep drop in the number of farmers, food and fiber production has kept outrunning demand. Since demand is not big enough to support all U.S. farmers at free-market prices, the Government has tried to prop up farm income with price supports. But the price-support approach has been a costly, ineffectual flop (TIME, Aug. 19).

Under C.E.D.'s plan, the Government would, over a span of five years or so, gradually withdraw all price supports. Meanwhile, it would whittle away at the farmer surplus with 1) the whole-farm "land retirement" program and 2) a federal-state-local voluntary resettlement program to inform marginal farmers about urban job opportunities and help them make the shift with free vocational training, even financial aid. The C.E.D. proposals would be expensive, but C.E.D. claims for them one outstanding virtue: "They would have a foreseeable end."

*Hercules finally managed to kill the thing by calling in a friend named lolaus to help. Every time Hercules lopped off a head, lolaus rushed in and cauterized the stump with a firebrand, keeping new heads from growing.

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