Headache Harvest

Any other country might consider itself blessed to hear what the Department of Agriculture told the U.S. last week: "Gains in yield prospects give promise of making 1960 the nation's biggest crop year." In the U.S., the news produced a shudder.

Nature's good tidings meant bad news for a lot of people: for farmers whose crops will be in oversupply, for the taxpayers who have to pay for costly federal programs to cope with farm surpluses, for harried Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson and for his successor in the next Administration.

On the basis of the new crop reports, the next Secretary of Agriculture would have to abandon Benson's assumption that lower federal price supports automatically lead to smaller crops and thereby get rid of gluts. When Congress let Benson test that assumption on corn last year--trimming the support price and abolishing the acreage controls--farmers expanded corn acreage by 15%. They harvested the biggest, most glutting corn crop in U.S. history. Farmers have again put just as much acreage into corn, and another corn glut is in pros pect.

Benson's successor will also have to drop the old assumption that the years of lean harvests come along and reduce the burdensome surpluses piled up in bountiful crop years. By old-fashioned norms, 1960's wet spring, instead of leading to record harvests, should have brought on poor crops, by interfering with farmers' spring sowing. But modern farm mechanization makes it possible for farmers to get their sowing done fast, during brief letups in the weather. Now a wet spring, storing up ground moisture for summer, brings bigger crops--and bigger headaches for the Secretary of Agriculture.

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