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This may still be the case despite the White House announcement, three days before the Iowa visit, that the President was extending for one year the grain supply agreement with the Soviet Union that is due to expire this September. Speaking last week to some 5,000 members of the National Corn Growers Association and their guests in Des Moines, assembled in the half-filled Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Reagan proclaimed: "The granary door is open, and the exchange will be cash on the barrelhead...
Surfeited with some 100 million surplus tons of grain, U.S. farmers bewail the missed opportunities. "It's a little like spitting in the ocean," complains Robert Delano, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "We have simply invited the Soviet Union to shop elsewhere to fill in its shortages." Says Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa: "This extension is great news for Argentine, Australian, Canadian and European farmers...
...extension was an understandable compromise between domestic political pressure from the farmlands and foreign policy concerns. Though President Reagan had lifted in April 1981 the partial embargo on grain sales that had been initiated by Jimmy Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he also abruptly cut off talks for a new, multiyear grain deal with Moscow after martial law was imposed in Poland last December. Since the military crackdown in Poland is still in effect and European allies are squawking about U.S. opposition to helping build the Soviet natural gas pipeline, Reagan could hardly strike a long-term grain...
Even if he had done so, the immediate effect on grain prices would have been negligible unless the Soviets had signed on for astronomical amounts of grain. The farmers' central problem is that bumper crops and record surpluses have put grain prices at dismal lows. In Kansas, where farmers have just harvested a record wheat crop of 440 million bu., grain is selling at a meager $3.65 per bu., down from $4.05 a year ago and from over $5 in 1973. In Oklahoma, where wheat is selling at $3.20 per bu., farmers invest nearly $6 to harvest each bushel...
...farmers are hurting equally. Grain farmers are in the worst shape: corn producers are even worse off than wheat growers because there is less demand abroad for their crop. Those who raise hogs and cattle are doing relatively better, thanks to climbing meat prices and, ironically for grain growers, the low cost of feed. Dairymen, who make up only 13% of all farmers, are faring best of all, since Washington buys up nearly all of their surplus products; last year the Federal Government paid out more than $2 billion in dairy price supports...