Word: marketeers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Carter Administration, which took office when farm prices were falling drastically, partially reversed the Butz policy. Besides urging farmers to participate in set-aside programs, it has, with considerable prodding from Congress, established target prices for wheat and corn that are above today's market quotes, even though these target prices by no means guarantee farmers a profit. Government outlays to support farm incomes have quadrupled in two years, to an estimated $7.9 billion in fiscal 1978. But the Administration has resisted pressure to set support prices still higher?even though Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland last winter had to climb...
Washington also could help all farmers?and the world?by pushing agricultural exports even harder. For example, U.S. negotiators at the world trade talks in Geneva might insist that the nation will do nothing to open the U.S. market wider to European and Japanese goods unless industrialized nations let in more American-grown food. The Government might also expand its aid?$10 million this year ?to farmers who organize cooperative groups that develop foreign markets. One tempting target: China, which has just begun to buy U.S. meat and grain and could use more. Carter has signed...
...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...
Meanwhile, a sweeping change in federal farm laws enacted in 1973 has forced farmers to become marketing specialists. Nearly all crops these days must be sold on the private market. Washington will make cash payments to farmers if market prices fall below Government-set "target prices" that supposedly cover most?not all?production costs. But no longer will Uncle Sam buy and store crops to prop the price; federal purchases these days are limited to small amounts for foreign aid, school-lunch programs and the like. Instead, the Government encourages farmers to store on their own land any produce they...
While these investments have made him a genuine corporate executive, Benedict looks on them merely as extensions of his farm. Says he: "I just wanted to sell grain and beets exactly when it best suited my own operation. The market is so crazy these days that if you can't get access to the price you want the moment it is offered, you might as well give up. Eliminate uncertainties, that's the golden rule. You eliminate uncertainties in production through technology and very careful management. You eliminate uncertainties in price by controlling the marketing as much...