Strike for Contracts

"Are you with us?" bellowed the big man on the platform. "Yes!" roared some 20,000 farmers and their wives in Des Moines' Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

With that assurance, President Oren Lee Staley of the militant National Farmers Organization last week announced what everyone in the building had come to cheer--a strike against food processors to force higher prices for many farm products. "This is a battle for survival of family-type agriculture," said Staley.

"American farmers have retreated as far as they can. We do not intend to retreat any further." Staley heads an organization that, since its founding in 1955, has enlisted an estimated 180,000 families and become the nation's fourth largest farm group--after the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Grange and the National Farmers Union. With branches in 16 states, the N.F.O.'s center of strength is among Iowa's dirt farmers.

No Subsidies. The guiding principle of the N.F.O. is that the U.S. farm mess can be solved only by farmers' taking union-style action, even to the point of striking against the food processors. Staley admits that such strikes, if successful, would raise retail food prices; but he argues that the U.S. taxpayer would find the increase well worth it. Reason: if the farmer were protected by contracts achieved through collective bargaining, there would be no need for the Government to fork out billions of dollars in subsidy payments.

Owner of a 400-acre hog-and-cattle farm near Rea, Mo., Staley, 39, directs the N.F.O. with evangelistic fervor and a shrewd eye. When the Committee for Economic Development issued a report in July saying that the number of U.S.

farmers should somehow be reduced by one-third during the next five years, Staley noted that one committee member was a Ford executive, another a Sears, Roebuck official. Staley promptly organized demonstrations against both companies. Farmers protested to their bewildered Ford dealers, returned their Sears catalogues by the thousands. In the end, both Ford and Sears issued statements pointing out that the officials had worked on the C.E.D. report as private citizens, not as company representatives.

Try, Try Again. At his press conference last week, President Kennedy expressed sympathy, of a sort, for the N.F.O.'s aim of achieving higher farm income. But he pointed out that farmer strikes had failed in the past. Three times before, the N.F.O. has tried brief, experimental strikes without noticeably influencing prices. At week's end, as the strike began, Staley admitted frankly that some of his members might not be willing to stick it out indefinitely. "It will be after the second week--possibly the third--before we can get down to the farmers who really mean to hold for whatever length of time is necessary. I think we've got the strength to win contracts this time. If we don't, we'll try again. We're not giving up. You can issue protests just so long before your reason for existence goes poof."

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