Word: farming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What keeps this clumsy, costly apparatus from the scrap heap is longstanding political regard for the farm vote. Understandably, U.S. farmers have learned to use political power to make up for economic weakness. Unlike big unions, farmers have no collective bargaining power. Unlike big corporations, they cannot control the supply of their products. When the nation's farms produce too much wheat, an individual farmer cannot keep the price up by holding part of his crop off the market: even a big farmer's share of the total wheat supply is a thimbleful in a carload...
...After 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...
...keep high price supports from boosting surpluses, the Government imposes acreage allotments on farmers who ask for supports.* Last year, in a further effort to hold down surpluses, Congress passed a soil-bank program to pay farm ers for taking acreage out of production. But the technological explosion makes such curbs futile. Last year, with strict acreage and marketing controls in effect, millions of acres in the soil bank and a severe drought pinching the Southwest, technology-armed U.S. farmers matched the biggest total harvest they had ever known. On land diverted from corn and wheat under acreage allotments, farmers...
...whatever economic benefit they bring, or fail to bring to farmers, federal farm programs exact a toll in morale. TIME correspondents in all major agricultural regions found farmers who wanted to talk "off the record" about temptations to dishonesty under the program. One Indianan sold the topsoil off a field and put the barren ground into a soil bank; a group of Californians use soil-banked acres to start future fruit orchards. Says Lynn Larson, who holds a city job to fatten his lean income from a 2O9-acre farm near East Garland, Utah: "Under these federal programs, the farmers...
Most farmers and farm leaders sense that changes in federal farm programs are overdue. A lot of farmers, and members of Congress too, favor a "two-price" plan under which 1) farmers would get 100% of parity for commodities sold for human use in the U.S., but 2) would get the free-market price for animal feeds and commodities sold for exports (a scheme sure to bring yowls against dumping from foreign countries...