AGRICULTURE: The Heavy Overhang

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¶New efforts to promote more diversified farming and better land use in the onetime prairie fields of the Great Plains.

From Bonanza to Reality. Ezra Benson, no politician, knows as well as the politicians in the Eisenhower Administration that the political clamor about the farm situation is dangerous. The farm belt, which could swing the 1956 Presidential election one way or the other, is uneasy. Democrats have been making and will make a lot of political hay out of this uneasiness in some farm areas, e.g., Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. But Ezra Benson will not be stampeded. After his conference with the President last week he said firmly: "This Administration, according to the President . . . will not attempt to outpromise or to out-appropriate some who would put politics above needs and lead farmers backwards rather than forward."

When the political shot and shell have cleared away, the U.S. may be grateful that a hard-nosed, unpolitic man of principle was in charge of its farm economy during the painful transition from wartime bonanza to peacetime reality.