Yes, Of Course

From the plains of eastern Washington to western Nebraska's prairie, wheat farmers last week voted overwhelmingly (83.3% in early returns) for continuing federal quotas--and high price supports--on the nation's No. 3 grain crop. Prime incentive in the voting: a $1.78-per-bu. federal guarantee for wheat grown under the quota system (v. $1.19 if controls were dropped). Spat Farmer D. O. Yost of Emporia, Kans.: "It's just like offering a kid the choice of 50-c- or 75-c- allowance a week, and asking him which he'd rather have."

As farm experts saw it, the referendum sadly underscored the fact that farmers, long hit by drought and the cost-price squeeze, have become too enmeshed in the U.S. subsidy program ever to vote their own way into the uncertainties of a free market. The 1958 quotas will do little to solve wheatmen's problems. Despite the acreage limitation program and the soil-banking of more than 12 million acres (in reality often poor land) at a cost of $231 million, the 1957 crop promises to be only a fraction smaller than last year, further adding to the nation's ominous 1.3 billion-bu. surplus.

Explained one Agriculture Department official last week: "Controls which were supposed to adjust production effectively have not done so. More fertilizer, more spraying, more of everything has merely increased yields per acre. It's plain we can't continue this way. Things could break wide open if changes aren't made in time."

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