Farm bill founded in days of exodus

 

By Amy Bickel

The Hutchinson News

 

Earl Hayes was just a 17-year-old kid in 1933, working on his family’s Stafford County farm for 25 cents a week amid the Great Depression.

Now 92, Hayes easily recalls those days, and remembers spending his wages in one night on 10-cent-a-gallon gas and 10-cent movie tickets before heading to the pool hall to blow the rest.

“I’d go home broke,” he said, noting his weekly situation on a Saturday night signaled what most in the farm sector experienced at the time.

It was around that same period that Hayes and his father had wheat on the ground at 30 cents a bushel during the June harvest, then picked it up and took it to the elevator for 25 cents a bushel. The younger Hayes watched as banks and mortgage companies foreclosed on one local farm after another.

“Times were tough,” said Hayes, who recently moved from his Zenith-area farmstead to a senior apartment. “You could buy farms at a bargain price.”

It was a time of mass exodus from rural America. Hundreds of thousands of farms went out of business. Drought and dust storms hurt income, with the average farm household making half or less than nonfarm households.

Commodity prices plummeted due to a surplus of crops. Some farmers found it more profitable to burn corn for fuel than sell it at 10 cents a bushel.

Hayes said there were two banks in Stafford, and the one his parents had their money in went belly up.

Then, Franklin Roosevelt became president, Hayes said, and his administration’s New Deal programs  were aimed at saving America’s farms and rural areas. The plan helped farmers recover from the economic collapse of the nation’s heartland.

“He started putting his loving arms around the farm people because he knew they were important,” Hayes said of Roosevelt. “He brought around some farm action.”

 

Nearly 75 years later

 

But when Roosevelt signed the first farm policy into law in May 1933, he promised it would be a temporary measure.

Yet more than 70 years later, the plan – though tinkered with over the years – still is in place, and many farmers remain dependent on subsidies to aid their farm income amid a tough farm economy that includes high fertilizer and fuel costs.

This year, the farm bill debate continues as Congress works on its latest measure – expected to pass sometime this fall. But it’s a different era than Roosevelt’s New Deal period, or even a decade ago.

Most Americans are far removed from the land that sustains them, unlike the 1930s when 25 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. Today, that figure is less than 2 percent.

The top two priorities for Roosevelt’s administration were to save “the family farm and help rural America,” said Troy Dumler, Kansas State University agriculture economist.

But one question looms for an industry where there are fewer producers farming the same amount of land: Does a program started amid the Great Depression still help those it was intended to help?

“That’s the million dollar question, you can basically argue both sides of that,” Dumler said. “Some say it helps a lot. Others say not much.”

 

A new New Deal

 

The government stepped in when successful farmers started losing their farms during the Great Depression. Programs established target prices for certain commodity crops, such as corn, wheat, cotton and rice. The program included payments for taking land out of production, as well as conservation efforts, said Donald Worster, a University of Kansas professor who wrote “Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 1930s.”

Roosevelt saw the farm bill as a temporary measure to help boost farm income, Worster said.

“But it became quite permanent.  Farmers became part of a welfare state. And for some people, it has meant a lot of money.”

The government has spent $164 billion on farm programs in the last decade, he said, noting the farm bill of the 21st century is no longer a poverty program.

“If you want to combat rural poverty, you give the money to the poorest,” Worster said. “But the subsidies today are going to a relatively small handful of people. They tend to be the richest farmers.”

Policy opponents, including the Environmental Working Group -- an advocacy group that tracks farm payments -- argue that subsidies aren’t helping the rural communities or the small family farmers that the first farm policy intended.

Still, farm bill leaders, such as Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., say the policy means a lot to a state like Kansas that ranks No. 1 for wheat and grain sorghum production, 10th for soybeans and seventh for corn.

“(It is) more than just about Kansas farmers and ranchers,” Moran told reporters in June during a House subcommittee hearing on the farm bill. “This is about whether or not we have people who populate our state, who live in our smaller communities and whether we have kids in our school systems.”

 

A different era

 

About a dozen farm bills have been passed since the creation of the first farm policy during the Roosevelt administration.

Every five to seven years, agricultural policies are evaluated and reauthorized through the federal farm bill. The last passed in 2002.

Those bills have added everything from a food stamp program – a move aimed at gaining urban support of farm programs – to a conservation reserve acres program, which pays farmers to turn cropland to grassland, Dumler said. The commodity title of the bill includes 20 different commodities.

The 1996 bill, known as Freedom to Farm and largely authored by Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, was written with an eye to expand agriculture trade and reform U.S. farm policy to comply with the World Trade Organization. The bill offered a program of decreasing income support payments, while giving farmers more planting flexibility and reliance on an open market.

It also removed the last remaining pillar of inventory management – the requirement for farmers to set aside a percentage of their acreage to qualify for government payments.

When farmers were allowed to produce as much as they could, prices collapsed, and the promised export expansion never materialized. Congress responded with a series of $20 billion in “emergency” bailouts over four consecutive years, according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Today, there is pressure from various groups and individuals, –including environmentalists, the World Trade Organization, members of Congress who represent urban areas and specialty-crop producers who don’t receive government checks – to uproot current policy, Dumler said.

Some say they need subsidies to boost household income, he said. In Kansas, subsidies make up 60 percent of the farm income. And of those receiving subsidies, much of it gets capitalized into land values.

Opponents make the argument that only 40 percent of the nation’s farms receive subsidies, with only 10 percent receiving a majority of the payments. Still others call for capping payments instead of continuing big handouts to wealthy farmers and landowners.

“A lot of people are pushing for reform,” Dumler said. “We still support the same commodities that we did in 1933, but things are way different now. Is support really justified now?”

 

Still vital?

 

Stafford County’s Hayes admits he probably wouldn’t have stayed with farming if it hadn’t been for New Deal legislation.

His father gave him interest in 20 acres when he first started farming full time. Hayes expanded his operation to 2,000 acres that spread across portions of Stafford, Gray, Finney and Reno counties.

In the 1970s, he went to Washington, D.C, nearly every month to lobby for farm bill legislation as president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers.

Hayes duly notes the consolidation in the farm sector, and has seen farms get bigger while communities shrink around them. Even the cooperative in the small town of Zenith, where he served on the board for 21 years, merged with a larger group.

Hayes began renting his land years ago. A new family moved into his farmhouse last month.

Still, he’d argue with anyone that subsidies are vital to rural America.

“Who pays the taxes in a rural community?” he asked. “It isn’t the person with the two or three children who is working for the co-op.”