Farm Bill at Work

Four months and 25 days and several million words after Congress convened with a farm bill as its main political goal, the U.S. had a new agricultural program. President Eisenhower, who vetoed the self-contradictory farm bill first passed by Congress (TIME, April 23), signed the new one last week--and within three days Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson began putting it into effect.

Ike had both praise and criticism for the new bill. The deciding factor in his mind was its soil-bank provision, which offers $1,250,000,000 in payments to farmers who agree to take crop lands out of production and place the acreage under soil-building cover crops or trees. The soil bank, said Ike, will "check current additions to our price-depressing, market-destroying surplus stocks of farm products. It is a concept rich with promise for improving our agricultural situation."

On the debit side, President Eisenhower was especially unhappy with the "unfortunate" requirement that about 5,000,000 bales of Government-held surplus cotton (for which the U.S. originally paid upwards of 32^ a Ib.) be dumped on the world market for, at most, 25^ or 26^ a Ib. This provision forces the U.S. to "follow an inflexible program of cotton export sales with little regard to costs and without adequate regard to the far-reaching economic consequences at home and abroad." It must be administered, said he dryly, "with extreme caution."

After a conference with the President, Ezra Benson announced plans for making immediate soil-bank payments to farmers who withdraw land from crop production this year. Benson's move was specifically authorized by the new bill, although Congress had refused to go along with the Administration's request for 1956 payments to farmers contracting to enter the soil-bank program in 1957. Benson's schedule of payments was generous: if based on the average yield over the last five years, it would offer $22 for each acre of wheat withheld from production (estimated per acre market value before costs: $36), $35 per acre for corn ($54), $49 per acre for cotton ($104) and $57 per acre for rice ($113). At those rates the farmer with especially promising crop prospects would probably stay out of the program this year, but the farmer afflicted by adverse conditions, e.g., drought, insect infestation, would be likely to plow under his crops. In that sense the Benson program was tooled to help the farmer who needed it most.

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