The East Hartford Gazette

Have a farm to rent for up to $10,000?

Secretary Ezra Benson's obvious sincerity and his implacable will may turn out to be assets after all: probably not by 1958.
But the hopelessness of a single man against the farm dilemma is too clear to be argued.
Here is another area which deserves and demands an agonizing reappraisal. The American farmer may be suffering to some extent from his own deficiencies but underneath all his troubles is a trend toward automation and synthetics that no Department of Agriculture juggling will stop.
The soil bank, ingenious as it was, was so full of inequities that it has fallen into Congressional and public disrepute. No fault of Mr. Benson's. The latest gimmick has, on the face, fewer administrative bugs and less public relations hazard. But the idea of renting entire farms, at annual rentals up to $10,000, to put them into cover crops and take them out of active production merely hints at the difficulties of "managing" an economy.
No doubt it would have the short-range desired effect of reducing surplus, raising the free market price of farm commodities, and perhaps ease the need for heavy subsidies. But that such a dire extremity as this would be approved in principle by some of the most conservative politicians and businessmen, too, causes considerable wonderment about the eventual role of the farmer in our world.
The size of our accumulated surpluses is fantastic. It is said that we could supply certain basic food requirements for the city of Chicago for a lifetime from what is at present in storage. We should dispose of these surpluses by outright gift to underdeveloped countries. It should not be done wholesale for fear of disrupting the international economy, but it is the only sound solution.
And then, tough as it would be, we have to go out of the subsidy business. This will force us to make an adjustment which, in the end, we will have to make anyway. Basically it is not sound over any extended period, to encourage through subsidies production of anything which cannot find a market for itself.
To the politicians, such a solution is suicide. But only for the party. For the country, the present and continuing efforts of the last quarter-century to "manage" the farm economy, offer only a slower economic suicide. It is time one of the parties took the chance, for it is difficult to believe that every farmer in the land enjoys living under the present dole system, or that the proposal of renting farms to the government makes any more sense to the country at large than renting factories to the government when the product does not find a ready market.