Agriculture: A Farewell to Farms

"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?" a once popular song used to ask. Nowadays, that is not the problem at all. In an agricultural policy paper published this week, the Committee for Economic Development, a highly respected organization of top-level businessmen and educators, takes a cool-eyed look at the Federal Government's farm mess and concludes that the essential problem is how to get more of the nation's farmers off the farms.

Fact to Be Faced. Since the late 1940s, overall U.S. farm output per worker has more than doubled. As...