Working for Subsidy

In Washington, where the farm program has been a political football for 30 years, bickering about subsidies has become a matter of tired and jaded argument. But there is nothing tired or jaded about the effect of the current runaway federal price supports on the farmers themselves. Last week TIME correspondents found them working toward the most mountainous subsidies and mountainous surpluses ever:

As the plentiful spring rains slackened from Ohio to North Dakota, the corn and wheat belts were alive with action. Around Great Bend. Kans.. wheat men hammered sharp new teeth into their combine blades. got ready for next month's start in the 1959 harvest--over 2.000,000 more acres than it took to grow last year's record crop. Iowa corn growers wheeled four-row planters into well-plowed fields, rolled into the biggest planting since 1949--a 12% increase over the acreage that grew last year's record crop. Weather permitting, U.S. farmers expect to produce the U.S.'s biggest wheat crop, the planet Earth's greatest corn crop.

Booming Business. The green seas of wheat in southern Kansas had already begun to "head out" into fat grain pods. One alert Kansas construction company rushed completion on 50 wheat elevators ranging from 200,000 bu. to 10 million bu. capacity. The skyscraping bins will be needed, experts believe, to hold a crop that will almost certainly add several hundred million more surplus bushels to the 2 1/2-year supply already in Government storage (storage costs: $500,000 a day).

The corn crop will draw on the renewed vigor of thousands of acres of land that has rested and stored up plant food in recent idle years, often in the soil bank's Government-subsidized acreage reserve. But the best yield of rich land is no longer good enough in the age of the new farm technology. This year, sales of hybrid seeds and fertilizers have shot up 15% to 30% over last year. The big fertilizer plants centered around East St. Louis have sold out record inventories. Chicago's Victor Chemical Works found demand for liquid fertilizers doubled from 1958's big sales, ran out of phosphoric acid (used to make phosphates) for the first time in memory.

"They Left It Wide Open." In their hard work for a monstrous 1959 crop, farmers paid little heed to scattered acres of silo-shaped metal bins already overflowing with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's $1.8 billion. 1,116,000,000-bu. corn surplus from previous years (storage costs: $370,000 a day). Instead, they were energized and motivated by the most startling subsidy'offer in 26 years of federal price-propping programs: a moneymaking price ($1.12 a bu.) for all the corn everybody could raise. The traditional acreage limitation on price-supported corn was abolished last fall by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, who naively expected a slight cut (14-c-) in price-support levels to bring a voluntary reduction in production (TIME, Dec. 8).

"I've been holding down, staying within the acreage allotment." said Iowa Farmer Kermit De Haii, who last week started to plant nearly 2 1/2 times the previous acreage on his farm near Des Moines. "But they left it wide open, and I'm gonna get in. I just want to grow corn."

As far as the U.S. farmer could see, there was only one real barrier to producing more surpluses under the bountiful, scandalous subsidy: in years to come, perhaps, the surplus-storage bins might take up enough space to limit the acres available for planting.

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