AGRICULTURE: The Great Sorghum Game

One amazing feature of the Agriculture Department's soil-bank program is its consistent tendency to build up farm surpluses instead of reduce them. Last week the newest example was sorghum, a flat leafed, long-stalked feed grain that means little to cityfolk. But it is a price-support gold mine to farmers, and a throbbing new headache to Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson.

This year the crop will be a whopper: 481 million bu., double last year's. One reason is a new hybrid seed; another is better irrigation. But the biggest is a wide loophole in the soil-bank law which permitted U.S. farmers...

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