Word: freemans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...acre general farm once owned by Freeman's uncle. Freeman inherited a one-fifth share, which brings him about $400 a year in income. A tenant, Arnold Gills, operates the farm "on halves," and Freeman carefully refrains from offering him any advice. The farm is not enrolled in any of Freeman's production-control programs. "I can't afford it," says Gills. "I got to grow...
...Freeman has a bulky domain to administer. Its budget, about $7 billion a year, is more than twice the combined expenditures of the Commerce, Interior, Justice, Labor and State departments. As of last January, a relatively slack time for Agriculture, the department had on the payroll 96,104 employees. Of these, only 11,807 were stationed in the District of Columbia and environs. The remaining 84,297 were scattered among thousands of outposts in the 50 states and numerous foreign countries. The number of farms and farmers in the U.S. keeps declining year after year-but the number of Agriculture...
...Peaceable Revolution. Freeman's bureaucratic beanstalk grew from a very small seed. Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, first head of the Patent Office, was keenly interested in agriculture, and in 1839 he managed to get from Congress an appropriation of $1,000 to distribute new plants and gather agricultural statistics. Agriculture remained a division of the Patent Office until 1862, when Abraham Lincoln signed a bill establishing a separate department under a Commissioner of Agriculture.* Lincoln said that Agriculture was "peculiarly the people's department, in which they feel more directly concerned than any other." Since about 60% of Americans...
Blessing a Burden. In a world in which millions still exist in hunger, the abundance of U.S. agriculture is in one sense a blessing. And Secretary Freeman keeps preaching that the people of the U.S. ought to regard their agricultural abundance not as a problem but as a "smashing success." As a result of that abundance, he argues, food is cheap in the U.S. Since the late 1940s, retail prices exclusive of food have gone up more than 30%. Over the same span, retail food prices have increased only 13%. This moderate rise in food prices reflected increased processing...
...abundance has brought staggering burdens along with its boons. Rising farm productivity has led to oversupply. To cope with it, the U.S. Government maintains a costly, creaky apparatus of price supports and production controls. "Our agriculture system," Freeman once conceded, "is on the one hand a miracle and on the other hand a mess...