Word: benediction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sometimes he pauses to reflect wistfully that the demands of managing a business with $3.5 million in assets keep him from doing as much of the actual planting and harvesting as he would like. Says Benedict: "I miss it, because spending eight hours in a tractor cab is a therapeutic kind of work. But I can't assign myself an all-day task running a machine any more. I have to be able to move about to make sure that it all comes together...
...farmer to complain that he does not get to spend enough time in the fields must be something new in the 10,000-year history of agriculture. But in the U.S. of 1978, Pat Benedict is archetypal of the farmers who make U.S. agriculture the nation's most efficient and productive industry and by far the biggest force holding down the trade deficit. Revolutionary changes are sweeping the croplands, making agriculture an increasingly capital-intensive, hightechnology, mass-production business. As a result, U.S. farmers are dividing into two distinct classes. Small farmers, who do not have the technical expertise...
...final uncertainty facing agriculture is Government farm policy. Pat Benedict complains that it consists of "frustrating contradictions," and he has a point. For 40 years, starting with the New Deal, policy aimed at having farmers restrict production and sell at high Government-supported prices. In 1973-74, Earl Butz tried a new tack: he lobbied through Congress the law under which farmers could no longer unload their crops on the Government, urged them to increase output by planting "fence to fence," and set target prices far below market quotes. He got away with it because rocketing export demand permitted farmers...
...future of American agriculture is really up to the farmers. Paradoxically, in an enterprise perhaps more heavily influenced by the Government than any other, big and efficient farmers like Pat Benedict are giving the nation a lesson in Adam Smith economics. By carefully calculating their potential profit in a free market, planning their operations around those computations and reinvesting the profits in more output, they are acting the way Smith said capitalists should. The results have been about what Smith predicted: growing production, rising innovation, expanding exports?and reasonable costs to customers...
...hope of the have-not world. Farm-product exports tripled in the past six years to almost $27 billion, helping mightily to offset the cost of imports. The U.S. exports more wheat, corn and other coarse grains (barley, oats, sorghum) than all the rest of the world combined. Pat Benedict and farmers like him are America's best hope to counter the trade challenge presented by the oilmen of Araby and the energetic manufacturers of Japan. U.S. food exports would be higher still were it not for a variety of barriers: outrageous quotas that keep Japanese consumers from buying...