SMALL FARMERS NEED NOT APPLY
Barnett, Mary
Small farmers need not apply The Government helps those who need help least Mary Bamett For more than forty years, Ian McMillan has raised cattle and grain on 1,360 acres of dry, rolling farmland...
...I should have ballooned it," he said of his estimate...
...In California, the nation's foremost agricultural state, 428 farms received $2.9 million in 1978...
...He was never paid and was unaware anybody else had been until I told him so...
...Do Federal farm programs which were set up in the spirit of conservation in fact serve the interests of agribusiness...
...While all this was going on to the south, however, Ian McMillan was appealing his own rejection...
...The Tejon is half-owned by the Times-Mirror Corporation, with gross sales of more than $1.6 billion in 1978...
...Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service...
...Financial statements were no longer required...
...If McMillan is right, the Emergency Conservation Programs today offer neither...
...The 40,000-acre Camatta Ranch, recently sold for $6 million, was granted $13,032...
...Understandably, he was indignant...
...ECP money is allocated by committees of farmers elected by their peers at the county level...
...Costs of repairs ranged from $500 to $780,000...
...Nationwide, these committees granted some 11,000 farms $16.3 million in ECP payments in 1978, $22.3 million in 1979, and $23 million in 1980...
...Evidence bears out his charge: In California, ECP's helping hand has been extended to some of the state's largest corporate farms...
...so they turned me down1...
...But a newly filled gully was a rich green...
...County committees were required, he was told, to consider a farmer's ability to pay for repairs...
...The 528-acre Clark Brothers Ranch, owned in part by William P. Clark, then a state supreme court justice and now Deputy Secretary of State, received $8,267...
...The reason...
...And finally, as of April 1978, committees were no longer required to consider the farmer's ability to pay rehabilitation costs...
...McMillan, on the other hand, whose repair work was deemed affordable without any Federal aid, had a gross income only forty times his request...
...It will be with us for yet another season, offering a lesson in the ways of the USDA, which helps the largest farmers to profit, whatever the winds, rain, and parching sun of summer may bring...
...He told the committee to go fly a kite," Cornell said...
...A 2,619-acre farm owned by multi-millionaire and former movie Mary Barnett is a free-lance writer in Felton, California...
...The memo reminded committee members that the ECP rules had been changed, and told them to stop considering each farmer's ability to pay for repairs...
...I decided to save the Government money...
...fter Hurricane Kathleen left CM more than $18 million worth of ¦ A farm damage in southern California's Imperial County, an Emergency Conservation Program was offered there...
...Or, as McMillan believes, the problem may be a clear preference for large farmers...
...McMillan never denied it...
...Conservation of hard-hit growing and grazing lands...
...The ECP, of course, is supposed to assist farmers facing heavy repair costs, and Sun Harvest and the Tejon Ranch may have argued that the thousands of dollars needed for repairs would have made some dents in their financial well-being...
...In February 1979, his appeal was rejected by the Federal ASCS office...
...But the committee insisted that he had to file or he wouldn't get any money...
...Since 1978, the seventy-four-year-old farmer has been battling the U.S...
...At one time, the program had stiff requirements to ensure the aid went only to farmers who truly needed it...
...Within a week, a memo arrived at the Imperial County Committee's office from then state executive director Howard Mays...
...His request was turned down because the total damage was less than 10 per cent of his net worth...
...But even that is not true, McMillan says...
...Perhaps the Government's left hand did not know what the right was doing...
...That, said McMillan, was where the topsoil was...
...No reasons were given for the changes, both of which violated the law...
...In 1977, the General Accounting Office arrived at much the same conclusion on the conservation issue, in a study that found Federal conservation programs ineffective and oriented toward production...
...Light brown earth was visible between sparse shoots of young barley on steep hillsides...
...It may have been mere coincidence, but among those present at the meeting when Lawrence's request was rejected was Kenneth Reynolds, a large Imperial County farmer and chairman of the state committee overseeing the ECP...
...The change came through in 1977, when we were processing grant applications resulting from Hurricane Kathleen," recalled Eldridge Cornell, who directs California's Emergency Conservation Programs at the state level...
...In addition, Amstar was granted $8,786 to repair three Spreckels Sugar Division beet farms...
...In the livestock and grain country of west-central California, McMillan and I stood on a deep green carpet of perennial pasture embroidered with spring wildflowers...
...And the 348,000-acre Tejon Ranch, California's fifth-largest land-holding, received $51,200 for reseed-ing land stripped of topsoil in a 1977 windstorm...
...star Joel McCrea received $1,622...
...So they turned me down...
...Sun Harvest, for one, received $22,639 to repair damage to its Monterey County farms...
...The immediate object of his dispute may not seem like much—a denied claim to $500 in Federal aid...
...the total for 1979 was $7 million/ According to McMillan, this well-intentioned program has come to favor large farmers over small, in violation of the Food and Agricultural Act of 1977...
...But all around him, he saw larger and more prosperous farms than his own receiving hefty chunks of ECP money...
...Applicants had to furnish financial statements...
...The limit on grant size was eased to a flat percentage rate for all farmers...
...The first applicant was Clifford G. Lawrence, who asked for $1,525 to repair his 220-acre farm...
...Research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...nobody bothered to tell him he had been eligible after all...
...Many large farmers benefited by this new arrangement, including Reynolds himself, who received $12,087...
...In both San Luis Obispo and Kern counties, the only two for which such figures were available, the average acreage of farms receiving ECP aid greatly exceeded that of those rejected...
...In either case, the Emergency Conservation Programs might still be worthwhile if they resulted in the conservation of farmlands...
...They're using Federal funds to scrape topsoil into the gullies," he said...
...Although the committees got financial statements from everybody who filed for payments, one absentee farm owner, a dentist, resisted...
...Originally, Federal regulations clearly required the county committees to consider the ability of the farmers to pay for their own repairs...
...But not Lawrence...
...It'll just wash out again in the first good rain...
...McMillan turned to the USDA's Emergency Conservation Programs (ECP), which share with eligible farmers the cost of repairing such damage...
...Actually, there were very few protests...
...The USDA program in question was established in 1957 to help pay for farm damage caused by wind, floods, hurricanes, or other natural disasters...
...Attempts to obtain acreage figures for other counties were frustrated by ASCS administrators who demanded advance payments as high as $1,000 for compiling the information...
...The committees had to determine when farmers could afford to do the restoration work themselves...
...But somebody in Congress must have griped, because the procedure was changed...
...Sun Harvest is a subsidiary of United Brands, which in 1978 had gross sales of more than $2.7 billion...
...it must be too costly for Sleek hands in the Federal cookie jar the farmer to repair, and it must be caused by a disaster unlikely to happen again...
...More difficult to rationalize, though, is the case of Amstar Corporation, a member of the Fortune 500 with gross sales of $958 million in 1978, which received all of $164 to help remove debris from a farm in the Salinas River Valley...
...And for farmers whose claims were accepted, the size of the grant was limited either to 80 per cent of repair costs, or the amount of repair costs the farmer was unable to pay—whichever was less...
...These cases reflect a general trend in all of the eleven California counties qualifying for ECP payments for the floods of 1977 to 1978...
...McMillan's trouble began during floods that soaked Calfornia from 1977 to 1978, when a small dam on his land was washed away...
...To merit ECP assistance, the damage must create new conservation problems threatening the productive capacity of the land...
...But the patches won't hold...
...The Government is paying the farmers to patch up man-made disasters...
...He explained that he had received bids from two construction firms doing farm damage repairs but found their charges were "bandit-ry...
...How did these sleek, uncalloused hands find their way into the ECP cookie jar...
...But one by one, these requirements were dropped...
...General notice of proposed rule changes must be published in the Federal Register thirty days ahead of time—a requirement that was simply ignored...
...McMillan cried foul...
...Yet notably, the ECP is one Government assistance program that emerged from President Reagan's budget-cutting spree unscathed...
...Fair play for small farmers...
...I decided to save the Government money by doing the work myself and charging only $4 an hour," he said...
...Across a ravine on a neighboring ranch, we could see quite a different setting...
...These hills aren't meant to be cropped...
...His $500 claim was turned down by a USDA committee consisting mostly of corporate farmers or their agents, who told him he could afford to pay for the repairs himself...
...But a closer look reveals the broader questions involved: Can small farmers expect fair treatment from the USDA...
...Small farmers need not apply The Government helps those who need help least Mary Bamett For more than forty years, Ian McMillan has raised cattle and grain on 1,360 acres of dry, rolling farmland in central California...
...The company's 1978 gross income was 112,690 times that sum...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
