Agriculture: How to Shoot Santa Claus

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food and fiber the U.S. can grow. "If I am right, and I'm afraid I am," he said, "very much more food will be urgently needed within a short time to avert world calamity." The challenge to the U.S. is to devise new and constructive ways to harness overproduction, to make Godsent abundance a blessing, not a curse.

For the next decade, at least, the logical solution to the farm problem —if logic is ever applied to it—may well lie in a slow, carefully phased, commodity-by-commodity lowering of price supports. At the same time, the Great Society should be able to afford a larger share of its anti-poverty funds for rural America, to provide jobs and training programs so that those who prefer to stay on the land are not forced into the cities. All this, coupled with direct, market-price purchases of commodities for the Food for Peace Program by the Government—rather than siphoning off surplus stocks—and the realistic prospect of greatly increased demand for U.S. farm products around the world, should in time assure farmers a better standard of living than they now enjoy, and a more rewarding way of life than growing—or not growing—food for Washington.

When that day comes, Charlie Shuman will gladly give up his job, get on the Panama Limited and go back to Moultrie County for good.

* Among them: onions, okra, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, kohlrabi, carrots, beets, tomatoes, rhubarb, sweet corn, potatoes, turnips, snap beans, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, sweet potatoes, musk melon, watermelon, strawberries, raspberries, eggplant, pumpkin, Brussels sprouts, parsley.

† Shuman confesses that he participated in a federal wheat allotment program in 1933, stayed in it about five years, but has "not been in programs since."