THE FARMERS' STRIKE
Breimyer, Harold F.
THE FARMERS' STRIKE HAROLD F. BREIMYER Plight and prospects The most improbable event of 1978 has to be the spectacle of farmers in tractor cabs and coal miners in headlanterned regalia...
...Along with their staged visibility, participants in the newly born American Agriculture Movement shouted their economic distress...
...Unfavorable even,ts there have been...
...They have declaimed especially against industrial unions in industries that supply farm inputs, such as tractor manufacture...
...First of all, it is true, as the protesting farmers remind us, that today's agriculture requires very large financial outlays...
...One influential delegation presented to the U.S...
...Even wheat prices are a little higher...
...How valid are the lamentations farmers raised during the winter of 1977-787 Any answer to this question is judgmental...
...Many are hanging on by a thread, including the non-foreclosure policy of the Farmers Home Administration...
...Some others are well off...
...They are as old as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794...
...Farmers now produce so much more wheat and corn per acre and per man, it is said, that somewhat lower price ratios can bring acceptable incomes...
...Symbol of what AAM farmers asked for was price parity...
...Farmers' unrest and demonstrations are by no means new...
...They are the wheat producers, the drought-struck farmers of the Southeast, the landhungry older farmers who overextended themselves, and the younger men who find their illusions dispelled and money gonemand who feel betrayed...
...Not a few are rich...
...The term dates from 1921 when George Peek, a tractor manufacturer, proclaimed that farmers should be able to buy, from the proceeds of selling a given quantity of wheat, hogs, or milk, the same number of shirts, hats, bags of twine, 12 May 1978:300 or tractors as they could buy in the pre-World-War-I period of 1910-14...
...It refers to a constant buying-power exchange ratio for farm products...
...Week by week political positions became more carefully reasoned...
...Established farmers "levered" themselves into buying more land...
...The economics was sound but the (farm) politics questionable: the majority of U.S...
...Only if each farmer will restrict his marke~ings in proportion to the taking power of the market could prices be kept at parity, the group said...
...What do protesting farmers want, it may be asked...
...Never before, though, has the industrial term of a strike been borrowed...
...Beef cattle have been in the doldrums owing to a combination of cyclical overstocking and tax-subsidized competition, but the price cycle is turning upward...
...Those critics could cite the statistic that farm products have not averaged full parity since 1952...
...An agriculture of small entrepreneurial holdings (usually called the family farm) may be on the way out...
...Alongside them were young farmers, eager to set up their households, who accepted the faith that the world needed our food and prices could never descend again...
...This is a main point of contrast with its agrarian antecedent...
...As a result of the inflation of values, U.S...
...They had to fight off nonfarmers, some of them sheltered by income tax rules...
...Perhaps more than ever before, farmers' wives joined in testifying to the financial pinch they were feeling...
...The farmers were the ones out of character...
...Farmers' pleas in 1977-78 that they are under-rewarded have been accepted at face value...
...In agricultural affairs it has a special meaning...
...What is more at stake, even though not clearly understood, is the survivability of the kind of agriculture that has been the tradition since our nation's founding...
...Big farmers on the West Coast have fought Cesar Chavez tooth and nail...
...If the 1794 event was rebellion, in the early 1930s farmers staged a "holiday movement," and in the later 1950s and 1960s Oren Lee Staley led his National Farmers Organization into "holding actions...
...City dwellers from San Diego to Augusta envisage the farmer as the epitome of industriousness if not heroism, as he risks his money and labor against variable weather and uncertain markets...
...THE FARMERS' STRIKE HAROLD F. BREIMYER Plight and prospects The most improbable event of 1978 has to be the spectacle of farmers in tractor cabs and coal miners in headlanterned regalia competing for news lineage and public sympathy...
...farmers resist tight control over their production and marketings...
...Some young farm families took on indebtedness of a size that to oldtimers seemed astronomical...
...I.n the wheat country there has been a sharp drop in the price of wheat, as that grain swung from world deficit to world surplus...
...Meantime, various contingents engaged in scattered incidents of harassment...
...Although the verb was given various interpretations the upshot was that they would not plant their crops in the spring--or, some said, they would plant only half their normal acreage...
...Another "unfavorable event" involves human error bu.t is an understandable aftermath of the boom years of the middle 1970s...
...As is typical in human affairs, we find a mixture of genuine and strategically-proclaimed distress, of valid and invalid citations of data, and of workable and unworkable solutions...
...And the 1977 farm law, as Secretary Bergland points out so tiresomely often, at least gives more federal aid than the 1973 law did...
...and delegates stalked the halls of Congress and I HAROI~ r. IIREIMYER is Perry Foundation Pro/essor o/ Agricultural Economics at the University o/ Missouri-Columbia...
...Many will eventually discover that their dilemma sinks deeper than the price of wheat or cattle...
...the farmers in their diesel tractors might be almost the last exponents...
...A bid for public sympathy and legislative relief rests less on dry statistics than on what is generally called the public image of agriculture...
...This is almost a quarter million dollars per farm...
...To date they have straw-grabbed in desperation...
...Its terms are fairly modest, to be sure...
...But farmers have been notoriously anti-organized labor...
...During the several years when world scarcity brought escalating prices for grains and soybeans, agriculture went into an investment ecstasy...
...The practical political outcome, a mere echo of announced aspirations, was some modification of the terms of the existing farm law, the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977...
...A few observations may nevertheless be offered...
...In 1977 they received for the products they sold an average of only 67 percent of parity prices...
...Of this $695 billion was physical assets...
...There will be no room for new family-farmer blood...
...Current trends that favor the well financed and tax-sheltered older farmers and nonfarmers over new young farmers will, if continued, convert agriculture to .hereditary and absentee landholding, plus parttime farms around cities...
...I.t is Gibraltar-strong...
...Some farmers are in fact in desperate circumstances...
...That law provides for voluntary idling of land, in return for which farmers are eligible fo., price support loans on their products and for direct "deficiency" payments from the Treasury...
...the offices of belabored Se:retary of Agriculture Robert Bergland...
...Their position, however, does not indicate accurately the financial picture of agriculture as a whole...
...They are a heavy burden: for the family farmer who has no outside resources, unfavorable events can be damaging...
...Initially a few otherworldly protesters called for a decree by government that products could be sold only at parity price...
...That image has been favorable...
...Much money i3 needed not only for original investment in land, but also for periodic r~urchases of machinery and annual spending for fertilizer, fuel, and pesticides...
...And to interpret the paradox mentioned above, if the government were to give a big boost 4o farm product prices, the price of land, now beginning to lose some steam, would spurt skyward again and stay out of the reach of young farmers...
...What is their legislative program...
...Congress a program calling for commodity marketing quotas for individual farmers...
...Hogs and dairy cattle are in fine position...
...Some proposals were ambitious...
...Coal n~iners on strike have been a part Of the scene since tha days of the Shakespeare-quoting John L. Lewis...
...Subconsciously--subliminally might be a better adverb--the protests may be grounded solidly in terms, and for reasons, that moat of the protesters do not perceive...
...What we have had during the 1970s is a sizable redistribution of wealth and income within agriculture...
...These are the four categories who have been most instrumental in the "strike" and the American Agriculture Movement...
...Against these w.as a debt of $119 billion, leaving an equity of $611 billion...
...Commonweal: 301 Hence, four ca.te'gories of farmers have found themselves in serious trouble...
...Young farmers' present peril brings into focus the fundamental question of who is to be privileged to own land in these United States of America, and under what terms to work it...
...Yet, paradoxically, the kind of relief the li tractor-driving farmers ask for might destroy them even faster...
...In the New Deal legislation of the 1930s parity was given statutory status...
...Established farmers who have ridden the inflation elevator upward, together with welbto-do nonfarmers-both exploiting income tax rules--have crowded underfinanced other farmers and especially young farmers virtually out of the pioture...
...Yet in the winter of 1977-78 a sizeable number of farmers from the Great Plains, Midwest and South declared that without a promise of "parity" prices they would "strike...
...Whon measured against that 1910-14 standard farmers have recently been badly off indeed...
...In March Secretary Bergland added the option whereby a participating farmer could idle an additional acreage of land and be paid for doing so...
...On January 1, 1978 total farm assets were valued at a huge $730 billion...
...Moreover, several kinds of enterprise are doing well...
...In the Southeast, devastating drought sapped farmers' financial reserves...
...agriculture as a single entity has never been in better position...
...But as also is common where human psychology is involved, the conscious and subconscious get interchanged...
...They also get free insurance against natural disaster in crop raising...
...Young farmers are probably the key to the future of the American Agriculture Movement...
...These summary judgments will now be explained...
...Financial risks therefore are very high...
...It remains to br seen whether its young-farmer contingent forces the AAM to address this basic issue...
...Parity as a word is an abstraction signifying equity or equality...
...Critics reply, however, that 1910-14 is too ancient a base for reliable comparisons...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
