The Nation: Plowshares into Swords

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With prices down and costs up, farmers threaten to strike

Across the American farm belt, homemade signs are sprouting up faster than soybeans in June. They are posted on idle tractors, trucks and combines, on the sides of barns and the walls of farm cooperative offices. NO DEAL, NO MEAL, they proclaim. Or NO PAY, NO HAY. Or FOR YOUR NEXT BAG OF SUGAR, CALL FIDEL. Blunt and pithy, they capture perfectly the mood of America's angry, embattled farmers.

Many militant farmers warn they will launch a nationwide strike on Dec. 14 unless Government price supports are raised substantially. They are threatening to stop selling their crops and stop buying supplies and equipment. Says Bud Bitner, a Colorado farmer who helped organize the protest, which is concentrated in such wheat-belt states as Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and the Dakotas: "We're not trying to shut off the food supply of the nation. We're trying to get a reasonable price."

A fair price is what the fight is all about. From 1974 through 1976, the farmer saw prices rise higher and higher as he found markets—at home or abroad—for just about everything he grew. But with worldwide bumper crops this year, the U.S. farmer has watched prices plummet to a five-year low: down 7% from 1976. Wheat, which sold for $2.92 per bu. last year, is bringing $2.55 in Kansas City. Corn has dropped from $2.75 per bu. to $1.80 in Chicago, soybeans from a high of $10.45 last spring to $5.50.

Meanwhile, inflation has relentlessly pushed up the prices that farmers must pay for machinery, energy and fertilizer. Farm production costs have jumped in ten years from $37 billion to almost $82 billion. A tractor that cost $9,000 in 1966 sells for $32,000 today; the diesel fuel to run it has climbed from 16.20 per gal. to 44.90. According to the Agriculture Department, though farmers' gross income is expected to surpass last year's record high of $103.5 billion, their net income will drop to an estimated $20.1 billion, from $22 billion a year ago and $33 billion in 1973, a peak year for farmers.

Bad times are particularly hard on the small farmer. Caught in a credit squeeze, he is usually the first to go bankrupt or give up (see box). Since 1970, farm debt has doubled to $101 billion. An Agriculture Department survey of the wheat belt last summer showed that 73,000 farmers were having trouble repaying loans, with some 14,000 of them likely to lose their farms. Edward H. Melroe, a Colorado grain farmer, reports: "I went to the bank last week for another $10,000 loan, and the banker told me: 'That's it. No more.' "

The number of U.S. farmers has declined from 4.1 million in 1959 to 2.8 million today. During the same period, the number of acres being farmed dropped by 10% to a current total of about 1 billion. Every year, 5 million acres of farm land are converted to urban or industrial use—enough to cut a three-mile-wide path from Washington to San Francisco. Says Charles West, who grows vegetables on 6,000 acres in Delaware: "If we have another year like this one, a third of the farmers in lower Delaware will be out of business."