Flies in the Barn

Scanning the somber men seated in front of him in a Capitol Hill hearing room last week, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Harold D. Cooley of North Carolina said that the committee "has never had so many distinguished witnesses before it at any one time." Seated shoulder to shoulder at the witness table were seven U.S. state Governors, all Democrats, gathered in Washington to protest the plight of farmers under the impact of a price decline that shrank agricultural income by 16% last year.

One by one. the Governors of Iowa, Michigan. Minnesota. Missouri, South Dakota. Wisconsin and Colorado read off statements abounding in such jolt words as "desperation" and "depression." Said Iowa's Herschel C. Loveless, leader of the Governors' march on Washington: Farm income dropped 29% below the 1958 level in Iowa last year, and "the farm income slump threatens the health of our entire economy." Said Colorado's Stephen McNichols: The state's "farm economy has been slipping more each year toward insolvency." Said Minnesota's Orville L. Freeman: "The continued disastrous decline in farm income must be halted and reversed."

Another Increase. Embattled Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson dismissed the Governors' invasion of Washington as "purely political." Pounding his desk, Benson insisted that his programs were "making headway." that he was "more optimistic than I have been in some time." But the 1960 crop estimates just released by the Secretary's own Agriculture Department provided scant basis for such optimism.

Last year Benson went onto a new corn program that abolished all production controls on corn in return for a modest reduction in the support price. Benson hoped that the lower support price would lead to a smaller crop; instead, farmers increased their corn acreage by a whacking 15%, harvested the biggest, most glutting corn crop in U.S. history. And by last week's new estimates showed a slight increase in 1960 corn acreage rather than the decrease that Benson had fervently hoped for. Barring something about as probable as a midsummer frost in the Midwest, the U.S. faces another corn glut this year.

Another Program. Hardly anybody any longer puts any stock in Benson's assurances that success for his programs is just around the corner. As campaigning warms up, many a G.O.P. congressional candidate in the Midwest is expected to do what Iowa's Republican Congressman Ben Jensen has already done: repudiate Benson outright. Vice President Nixon is working on his own goodbye-Benson farm program, to be unwrapped soon after the G.O.P. nominating convention.

In working out his farm program, Nixon--or any other presidential hopeful--faces a formidable task. Appeals for a new farm program are as plentiful in Election Year 1960 as flies in a cow barn, but no politician in either party has come forward with a really convincing program for cleaning up the mess.

Another Web. The seven Democratic Governors on Capitol Hill could offer nothing better than half-hearted endorsement of a farm bill sponsored by Texas' Democratic Representative W. R. Poage, which would substitute an entangling web of marketing controls for the present system of price supports and production controls. Charges the American Farm Bureau Federation's President Charles B. Shuman: The Poage bill would bring "a degree of control over individual operations far exceeding anything we have thus far experienced."

But difficult as it is to devise an adequate farm program, the 1960 aspirants to the presidency must give it a wholehearted try. If the seven Governors contributed nothing to a solution of the farm mess, they at least underlined the point that it ranks as one of the biggest domestic issues of 1960.

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