Plight of Plenty

Despite alltime-record output of wheat, rice, feed grains, soybeans, pea nuts, sugar cane, meat, poultry and eggs, America's 3,000,000 farmers will pock et 10% less income this year than in 1966. After six straight years of rising income amid inflation, the slump in prices gives the farmer less net purchasing power than he has enjoyed since mid-Depression 1934. While complaint has always been their bumper crop, U.S. farmers last week threatened to beat their plowshares into swords.

The National Farmers Organization, having staged its own market boycotts, now calls for collective bargaining to raise farm prices, and is getting encouragement from Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman. Charles Shuman of the nation's largest farm group likes the idea too, so long as it is free of Government interference, but this is about his only point of agreement with Freeman. As the American Farm Bureau Federation elected Shuman to his seventh term as president, he called for an end to all federal farm controls. Free man said that "fang and claw" marketing would "cut farm income a third," but Shuman retorted: "Those who have been predicting that farmers would drown in a sea of surplus with Depression-level prices if farm programs were ended must be embarrassed to discover that this result has been achieved un der the Great Society's management programs."

The farmers' problem is their masterful man-hour productivity, a 5.7% annual hike since 1950, v. industry's 2.6%. Despite a pastiche of Government programs to control production and protect prices, farmers continue to grow more on fewer acres through fertilization, mechanization and technology. Freeman indeed takes part of the blame for this year's bumper crop because he trusted all-but-unanimous warnings of impending poor harvests and drastically increased planting quotas, then watched in dismay as ideal weather brought in history's greatest yields--both of food and discontent.

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