AGRICULTURE: Apostles to the Farmers

• Share

Like all good Mormons, Ezra Taft Benson has served his young man's term (1921-23, in Great Britain) as a missionary for the church. So has his son Reed, 28, who spent 30 months abroad, and for two years more was an Air Force chaplain. Last week the Bensons, father and son, were at large in the U.S. doing another kind of missionary work: trying to propagate the faith in Benson's policy, which is under broadside attack from the farm belt.

A political science graduate of Brigham Young University, and now a field representative of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, Reed Benson was serving as the elder Benson's aide. His assignment covered a wide range of duties. Asked what he did when someone threw a hot political question at his father, Reed said: "I probably just say a good little prayer for him and know everything will come out all right."

A Hassle over Pork. As Ezra Benson moved across the U.S., such assistance was needed. In Chicago he trudged through the manure in the stockyards, spotted and sold (to a livestock commission buyer) a choice lot of hogs at $15.25 a hundredweight, 25¢ above the day's previous high. Given a stockman's cane as a souvenir of his feat, Benson later referred to the cane as a reminder that hogs should never "go below that price again." But before the week was out, the top for hogs in Chicago had slipped to $14.85.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Estes Kefauver, the greatest poser for trick pictures since Laocoön, cried out in the U.S. Senate that Benson's appearance in the stockyards was "huckstering" and a "childish political episode."

Despite the political clamor for his resignation, Benson was still up to his old determination to tell people what he thought they should hear, whether they wanted to hear it or not. At a meeting of the National Swine Industry Committee in Chicago, he read a lecture to the processors and distributors of meat products. Said he: "I have been extremely concerned in recent months that prices to farmers were going down while marketing margins were going up. In other words, low hog prices were not fully reflected in pork values to the consumer ... I am fully aware that total costs of processing and merchandising pork have gone up, as they have in other farm commodities. I believe firmly you're entitled to a fair return. But when one segment of the meat team is suffering, it cannot be too long before other segments also will suffer . . . I urge you in the industry to tighten up your costs. Keep your profits and margins in line . . . This is no time to take advantage of the American farmer."

A quick reply came from the American Meat Institute, which said that "packers" profits are notoriously low—too low, in fact, to provide adequate funds for plant improvement and modernization, research and promotion. In 1955 . . . meat packers' earnings averaged less than a cent per dollar of sales."