AGRICULTURE: Farming the Farmer

Shoulder to shoulder in Denver's Shirley Savoy Hotel last week sat 1,200 farmers, farm wives, farm economists and farm politicians, gathered in biennial convention to 1) urge federal farm subsidies ever onward and upward, 2) call for the scalp of Republican Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson-and 3) elect onetime Typewriter Salesman James G. Patton, 55, to his 13th consecutive term as president of the liberal National Farmers Union. Cried Jim Patton, sounding the N.F.U.'s anti-Administration theme: "Our patience has been imposed upon by those in power chiseling away at nearly every program farmers worked so hard to build."

In private, rawboned, wavy-haired Jim Patton scarcely ever raises his voice above persuasive conversational tones. But in public, his is the loudest if not the wisest Democratic voice in U.S. agriculture. He speaks through the National Farmers Union, with its 750,000 members (see map), and a network of N.F.U.—run magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and radio programs. Patton's upper councils are a Democratic Farm Cabinet-in-exile: Harry Truman's Agriculture Secretary Charles Brannan is the N.F.U.'s general counsel; Wesley McCune, onetime Democratic National Committee farm specialist, is the public-relations director; Leon Keyserling, chairman of President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers, is a consulting economist for the N.F.U.

Big Business. But if Jim Patton's N.F.U. is big political business, it is also big money business, with a vested interest in high farm subsidies-the higher the better. The N.F.U.-founded Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association is worth $33 million, reaps about a $3.5 million cash harvest each year in Government payments for storing grain surpluses stimulated by N.F.U. high-subsidy policies. Among other N.F.U. interests:

¶The National Farmers Union Life Insurance Co., with $100 million of insurance in force.

¶ The National Farmers Union Property & Casualty Co., which last year took in $10 million in premiums.

¶ A half-interest in a 15,000-acre, $175 million potash deposit in New Mexico. The other half-interest belongs to Kerr-McGee Oil Industries and Phillips Petroleum Co. Oklahoma Democrat Robert Kerr, chairman of Kerr-McGee, is among the staunchest N.F.U.sliners in the U.S. Senate.

¶ Close financial ties with the Farmers Union Central Exchange, whose 900 outlets grossed $75 million selling petroleum, machinery and other farm supplies.

The Blessed Are the Rich. Although the National Farmers Union is the champion of the "poor" and the "small" farmer, the man who built the N.F.U. is by no means embarrassed by its wealth. Says N.F.U. President Patton: "I do not think it is blessed to be poor, at least not in the U.S. I've been poor, and I didn't see anything blessed about it."

Kansas-born Patton is the son of an engineer who helped found a short-lived cooperative farm at Nucla, Colo. Jim worked on farms, took odd jobs to earn extra money, paid his way through Western State College of Colorado, wound up with a Depression-days job selling typewriters. "Jim was a terrific salesman," says a longtime acquaintance. "He has always had a tendency for main-chancing."