Agriculture: How to Shoot Santa Claus

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fertilizer. Moreover, as a grower, consumer and notoriously tetchy voter, the U.S. farmer today is a rough-knuckled realist. Yet he has a wide streak of idealism. Those who, like Shuman, decry federal management of agriculture, do so in part with the prideful assurance that every attempt to keep the U.S. farmer from growing more food is doomed to failure. Today, thanks to revolutionized technology, the man who can make two ears of corn grow where one did before knows well that tomorrow there will be three—or four.

Flood Tide of Plenty. That lesson has never been more conclusively demonstrated than in the summer of 1965. This month and next, despite three decades of heroic federal efforts to limit the land's insistent bounty, farmers from ocean to ocean and border to border will harvest the largest crop in the nation's history—1.4 billion bu. of wheat, up 7% from last year; 4.1 billion bu. of corn, up 15% ; 961 million bu. of oats, up 9% ; 624 million bu. of grain sorghum, up 27% ; 120 million tons of hay, up 3% ; 864 million bu. of soybeans, up 23%.

Such a flood tide of plenty is enough to feed and clothe half the world—and, under the Food for Peace Program, $1.7 billion worth will, in fact, find its way to some 100 million people, provide school lunches for 40 million schoolchildren, help stave off famine and political unrest the world over. The residue, added to the nation's vast stockpile of surplus commodities, will merely compound what urban Americans have long accepted as "the farm mess."

"Crazy Quilt." Squirreled away in silos and warehouses, the mess is worth $6.8 billion, consists of 795 million bu. of wheat, 1.2 billion bu. of corn, 640 million bu. of grain sorghum, 12 million bales of cotton and 1.1 billion Ibs. of tobacco. Though it has shrunk somewhat as a result of Food for Peace shipments, this vast reserve costs $365 million a year merely to store, and threatens to expand again as a result of this year's mighty harvest—which Agriculture Department officials view as an unmitigated disaster.

The greater disaster, of course, has been the almost total failure of bureaucrats, economists and politicians to anticipate and control the ever-rising productivity of the U.S. farmer. "Why don't they leave us alone?" cries Shuman. "Why don't they get out and let the farmers run their own business?" By "they" he means Congress, the army of Government farm experts commanded by Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, and what Shuman calls the "crazy-quilt patchwork of stopgap farm programs"—all hopelessly complex, all composted of political expediency, and all, in Shuman's view, a complete failure.

The symptoms have been visible for decades. In the past 50 years, agriculture has advanced faster and farther in the U.S. than in any other country in the entire previous history of the world. Today, one man-hour of farm labor yields more than five times as much food as it did in 1920. Crop production is 70% higher per acre; output per breeding animal has doubled. The productivity of the U.S. farm worker has shot up 7.7% since the 1950s, compared with only a 2.8% rise for industrial workers. The farm worker who fed twelve people in 1945 feeds 32 today.

The technological revolution that made this possible came in four stages: 1) the