Come & Get It

A Government man got in touch with Farmer Art Wardner of East Grand Forks, Minn, one day last week to buy up Art's big stockpile of 1949 potatoes. It was a cozy ceremony and just crazy enough to point at one of the more fantastic aspects of the U.S. farm program. The Government man agreed to pay Art $2,336 for his 160,000 pounds of spuds at $1.46 a hundredweight. Then, without a single potato changing hands, Art wrote a check for $16. He mailed it to the Government, thus bought back his potatoes for cattle feed at 1-c- a hundredweight.

Thanks to the farm lobby and the flabby generosity of the U.S. Congress in its worship of the farm vote, U.S. potato growers were in the fat and the whole farm program was in the fire. The Department of Agriculture, set to administering a law it didn't like, had ordered potato acreage cut--but growers had simply moved their potato rows closer together, poured on the fertilizer and grown more spuds per acre. By pegging potato support prices high (currently at a top of $1.80 to $2.40 a hundredweight), the U.S. Government was stuck with 50 million bushels of potatoes it could neither sell without undercutting its pegged price nor give away.

At the same time, brokers in a dozen U.S. cities had been importing up to 5,000,000 bushels of potatoes from the spud-rich Canadian farmlands in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The Canadian growers were gleefully doing their biggest export business in years. Even after U.S. Customs collected 37 1/2-c- duty on every 100-lb. sack for the first million bushels of table potatoes and the first 2.5 million of seed potatoes and twice as much duty on all subsequent potatoes, the Canadian spuds were cheaper than the homegrown subsidized ones.

There was a lot of embarrassed discussion of the subject going on in Congress last week; the farm lobby feared that the potato foolishness might jeopardize all of their subsidies. The subject plagued Congressmen even when they went into the House and Senate restaurants to eat. When they asked for potatoes, they got Canadian potatoes.

And then there were eggs. In one of the great egg-lays of all time, the Government had deposited close to three billion dried eggs in a Kansas cave and in storage centers throughout the country. Since no one wanted to buy them, the Department of Agriculture last week announced that it would begin giving away 73 million pounds of dried eggs (cost to U.S. taxpayers: $95 million) to schools and relief agencies.

Then, undaunted, Agriculture bought still another million and a half pounds more of dried eggs during the week.

The department was also offering 169 million pounds of dried milk free (bought for $21 million)--and buying up three-quarters of a million pounds more a day.

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