When he took a good look at the results of last November's Democratic landslide, Michigan Farmer Stanley Yankus Jr. decided to give up his five-year battle against federal crop controls. "The men who were elected to Congress this time," he told his wife Mildred, "would not change these farm laws—they're all for subsidies." So Farmer Yankus applied to Australia ("the least socialistic country in the world")* for an immigration permit and, having won it, last week on his 40th birthday asked the U.S. State Department to issue passports to himself, his wife and their three children. "I didn't arrive at this decision lightly," explained Yankus, a somber, earnest six-footer who was raised in Chicago by immigrant Lithuanian parents, saved through his early life to fulfill his dream of owning a farm. "I did it for a selfish purpose—for my children, because I can foresee the time when they would be bound hand and foot by these controls.''
Before he can leave the U.S., Yankus must sell his100-acre farm near Dowagiac in southwestern Michigan, finish paying off $4,562 in penalties levied against him in court by the U.S. Government. His offense: raising for his 5,000 chickens more wheat than he was allowed under the average-quota system.
Under the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act (first ruled constitutional in 1942 and confirmed by the Supreme Court in a Texas case last week), all farmers in commercial wheat states are bound by quotas if two-thirds of the wheat farmers agree to quotas. Yankus understood the law but opposed it because he 1) did not want the subsidies that go with quotas;
2) feeds all his own wheat to his chickens;
3) was never allowed to vote on the quota issue himself, because farmers with less than 15 acres of wheat were barred from the referendum; 4) does not believe in the farm support program as a matter of principle.
From 1954 through 1958, Yankus kept on planting 25 to 35 acres more than his ten-acre allotment. Each year he was fined; each year the Government piled on another penalty, until the total got to $4,562. "I decided to quit," he told a Democrat-controlled House agriculture committee last week, "when it became obvious the fight no longer was with the United States Government but with the people who want something for nothing —the 'gimmes.' "
*Yankus may be disappointed. Though Australia as yet has no acreage controls, a government monopoly markets all wheat, guarantees export prices under quotas, pegs domestic prices.