Word: wheats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Designed to cut surpluses by subsidized sales of grain and cotton abroad, it is so rigged that, as overseas sales are successful, price supports rise automatically - hence bring on more surpluses. Designed to ensure farm stabilization, it has instead warped the farm economy, e.g., Northwest farmers, restricted on wheat acreage, grow barley instead, and are now starting a cattle-feeding program to use the barley. "The hell of it is," said one of them, "all it would take is an administrative ruling right now to rip up the whole program...
...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. In a free market, even modest surpluses can send farm prices sinking drastically. Vulnerable...
...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 67 to 26. Since the early 19403, the average U.S. farm investment per worker has soared from $3,500 to more than $15,000. This technological explosion has made the small, unmechanized farm economically obsolete...
...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 bring in crops - barley, soybeans, sorghums - that compete with corn and wheat as livestock feeds. Result: bigger corn and wheat surpluses. "As soon as they plaster a patch on one place," says an Illinois farm-organization official, "something squirts out in another...
...farmers an income-tax break by letting them average good years with bad. A little (ten acres) Georgia cotton farmer who seldom nets more than $400 a year, thinks the only "fair thing" is 100%-of-parity supports under all farm commodities-or at least under cotton. A Colorado wheat farmer offers still another plan: "Congress should create huge cooperatives to handle the crops, and only enough should be let out to maintain the market." But farm experts who take a broad view see no simple, straightforward answer. "The farm problem," broods an Illinois farm economist,"is semi-economic, semipolitical...