Word: bensons
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...farm prices sank in the '20s and '30s, the New Deal bolted together the prototype support machinery. Far from dismantling it and building a sounder model as the Depression gave way to postwar national prosperity. Congress kept attaching gimmicks and gadgets. Meanwhile, what Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson calls a "technological explosion" has taken place on U.S. farms. The combined impact of more machinery, more fertilizer, deadlier insecticides and higher-yielding hybrid seed has upped overall U.S. farm productivity by onethird since 1940, lowered the number of man-hours needed to produce 100 bu. of wheat from...
...prickly the porcupine is, nobody knows better than Ezra Taft Benson. He went to Washington in 1953 convinced that a dedicated agriculture secretary, willing to rise above politics and make himself personally unpopular, could end huge surpluses, high price supports, acreage controls and big Agriculture Department budgets. But it was Benson's bad luck to take his job just as the farm economy was about to feel the technological explosion's full impact. Under the impact, farm prices sagged. With net farm income sliding from $13.3 billion in 1953 to $11.6 billion in 1956, U.S. farmers were...
...from Congress in 1954 a grudging bit of price-support flexibility, but last year it took an Eisenhower veto to keep Capitol Hill from restoring the old system of rigid, mandatory support, at 90% of parity, under six basic farm commodities, including wheat, cotton, corn. Benson himself has had to learn to bend with political winds, to compromise, zigzag and, as he puts it with a wan smile, "rise above principle...
Despite all the porcupine quills stuck in him, Ezra Taft Benson still hopes to get a radically altered price-support program through Congress next year. Enough fresh evidence of the current program's failure has piled up, he trusts, to convince Capitol Hill that it is high time for a change...
Under the escalator clause of the price-support law, supports move up or down according to total supply, as well as according to changes in the general price level. Now that the export program has cut the carryover, Secretary Benson will probably have to boost price supports for the current 1957 crop well beyond the 28.15? per Ib. price he set last February. The net effect, as Under Secretary of Agriculture True D. Morse wrote the House and Senate Agriculture Committees a fortnight ago, will be to encourage farmers to produce more cotton, which in turn will mean a higher...