Plowshares into Swords

With prices down and costs up, farmers threaten to strike

Across the American farm belt, homemade signs are sprouting up faster than soybeans in June. They are posted on idle tractors, trucks and combines, on the sides of barns and the walls of farm cooperative offices. NO DEAL, NO MEAL, they proclaim. Or NO PAY, NO HAY. Or FOR YOUR NEXT BAG OF SUGAR, CALL FIDEL. Blunt and pithy, they capture perfectly the mood of America's angry, embattled farmers.

Many militant farmers warn they will launch a nationwide strike on Dec. 14 unless Government price supports are raised substantially. They are threatening to stop selling their crops and stop buying supplies and equipment. Says Bud Bitner, a Colorado farmer who helped organize the protest, which is concentrated in such wheat-belt states as Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and the Dakotas: "We're not trying to shut off the food supply of the nation. We're trying to get a reasonable price."

A fair price is what the fight is all about. From 1974 through 1976, the farmer saw prices rise higher and higher as he found markets--at home or abroad--for just about everything he grew. But with worldwide bumper crops this year, the U.S. farmer has watched prices plummet to a five-year low: down 7% from 1976. Wheat, which sold for $2.92 per bu. last year, is bringing $2.55 in Kansas City. Corn has dropped from $2.75 per bu. to $1.80 in Chicago, soybeans from a high of $10.45 last spring to $5.50.

Meanwhile, inflation has relentlessly pushed up the prices that farmers must pay for machinery, energy and fertilizer. Farm production costs have jumped in ten years from $37 billion to almost $82 billion. A tractor that cost $9,000 in 1966 sells for $32,000 today; the diesel fuel to run it has climbed from 16.20 per gal. to 44.90. According to the Agriculture Department, though farmers' gross income is expected to surpass last year's record high of $103.5 billion, their net income will drop to an estimated $20.1 billion, from $22 billion a year ago and $33 billion in 1973, a peak year for farmers.

Bad times are particularly hard on the small farmer. Caught in a credit squeeze, he is usually the first to go bankrupt or give up (see box). Since 1970, farm debt has doubled to $101 billion. An Agriculture Department survey of the wheat belt last summer showed that 73,000 farmers were having trouble repaying loans, with some 14,000 of them likely to lose their farms. Edward H. Melroe, a Colorado grain farmer, reports: "I went to the bank last week for another $10,000 loan, and the banker told me: 'That's it. No more.' "

The number of U.S. farmers has declined from 4.1 million in 1959 to 2.8 million today. During the same period, the number of acres being farmed dropped by 10% to a current total of about 1 billion. Every year, 5 million acres of farm land are converted to urban or industrial use--enough to cut a three-mile-wide path from Washington to San Francisco. Says Charles West, who grows vegetables on 6,000 acres in Delaware: "If we have another year like this one, a third of the farmers in lower Delaware will be out of business."

Facing such prospects and resentful of the seeming indifference of the rest of the country, farmers are understandably in the mood to beat their plowshares into swords. Talk of a farm strike began last July as grain elevators filled to capacity; excess wheat spilled into the main streets of rural towns and prices began to slide seriously. Disgruntled farmers staged impromptu demonstrations. In Clarkfield, Minn., a tractor caravan of 500 farmers spearheaded a protest. Jon Wefald, a former Minnesota agriculture commissioner, urged the protesters: "Do like the sheiks did with the oil. One day they sat down and said: 'It's all over, boys. We're going to start charging you.' I'm waiting for you to do the same thing."

In mid-September dissenters met in Springfield, Colo., to launch a new national organization called American Agriculture. Ten days later, 2,000 farmers from 19 states gathered in Pueblo, Colo. When Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland came to address the group, some farmers greeted him with boos and catcalls. The farmers told Bergland they were supplying food for a nation that either did not understand their problems or did not give a hoot about them. They demanded that the Federal Government boost price supports to 100% parity, a figure based on the prices that farmers received in the relatively prosperous period from 1910 to 1914. Calculated in today's terms, such price supports would boost wheat to a whopping $5 per bu., a figure that would outrage consumers and spur inflation.

Bergland is sidestepping the parity issue. He argues that the new farm bill, signed into law in September, will benefit farmers more than they think. It raised price supports for corn from $1.75 per bu. to $2, and the target price of wheat from $2.47 to $3. Both programs distribute money to farmers when prices fall below certain levels. In November $1 billion in Government checks will begin going out to wheat growers for their summer crop. When that happens, Bergland believes, the farm heat may simmer down.

Farmers do not agree. They argue that the extra subsidies will still not fulfill Jimmy Carter's campaign pledge to cover their production costs. So far, American Agriculture, operating out of a small one-story building in Springfield, has spent a modest $20,000, raised from farmers' donations, to print leaflets, make telephone calls and send out proselytizers. "You can't believe the response," says Dan Yokum, a Colorado farmer who helps man the phones in the organization's headquarters. Argues Bud Bitner: "This thing is cooking all over the U.S."

Farmers' wives have also joined the action. Michigan-based American Agri-Women, representing some 12,000 farm women, dispenses information, delivers pep talks, and lobbies state legislatures and occasionally the U.S. Congress.

Despite these varied and growing efforts, can the farmers (and their wives) really pull off a nationwide strike? Similar efforts in the past have foundered on the farmers' craggy individualism. Already, 80% of the winter wheat has been planted--a sign that farmers are not exactly slowing down. Says Farmer Harold Klein, who is active in the North Dakota wheat pool, an organization set up to eliminate the middleman in handling exports: "The farmers talk about strikes but go ahead and plant anyway, hoping that their neighbors will do the striking."

But harsh times may have persuaded farmers, if not to love their neighbor, at least to work with him to regain the prosperity that was so suddenly and cruelly snatched from them.

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