Agriculture: How To Succeed in Farming Without Creating a Mess

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Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman once summed up U.S. agriculture as half miracle and half mess. The miracle is the wondrous surge of farm productivity over the past few decades. Since 1920, farm output per worker in the U.S. has not just doubled or tripled, but quadrupled. The mess is twofold. There is the problem of overproduction. Freeman's Agriculture Department spends about $7 billion a year, largely in hapless efforts to cope with farm surpluses. And there is the problem of rural poverty. The average farm-family income from farming, according to U.S. Government statistics, is less than $3,000 a year—considerably less than half the average for urban families.

In a just-published book entitled Farms and Farmers in an Urban Age, Agronomist Edward Higbee, a University of Rhode Island professor, takes a refreshingly clear-eyed look at the miracle and the mess. Sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund, the book cuts through the confusion of federal farm policy like a well-honed scythe leveling a weed patch.

The $217-a-Year Families. Much of the muddlement of U.S. farm policies, argues Higbee, results from statistical fallacies. As the Agriculture Department reckons it, any grower of crops or raiser of livestock who has at least ten acres of land and markets at least $50 worth of farm goods a year counts as a "farmer." But that term includes everybody from the Southern mill hand who grows a field of cotton as a sideline, netting $70 a year on ten acres, to the Southwestern cotton baron who manages his empire from an air-conditioned office, netting $65,000 a year on 1,000 acres. The Agriculture Department offers the mill hand and the baron the same support price on their cotton. A farm policy that treats rich farmers, poor farmers and part-time farmers as if they had the same problems and the same need for Government help is detached from reality, Higbee argues.

In the last "census of agriculture," taken in 1959 by the Census Bureau, 44% of those classified as farmers marketed less than $2,500 worth of farm goods a year. These families, whose poverty is often cited as a reason why federal farm subsidies must be continued, are not really farmers at all by any sensible criterion. Their net family income from agriculture averaged $217 a year. Their nonfarm income came to $2,884 per family. Counting them as farmers, and including their $217 a year in the national farm income averages, distorts and muddles federal farm policy. "These people," urges Professor Higbee, "should not be seriously considered when farm policy is debated and formulated."

It Takes More Than Work. The rural poor, says Higbee, cannot hope to prosper as farmers, because they do not have and cannot get enough capital. The spectacular rise in farm productivity in recent decades has resulted from a combination of improved technology and heavy capital investment. An ever increasing share of total U.S. farm output is produced on big, heavily capitalized farms. The top 9% of the farms account for 50% of total farm production. The top 3% of the farms produce as much as the bottom 80%. Large-scale farmers make exceedingly good livings—not from handling plows and pitchforks energetically, but from managing capital effectively.