The highlights for 1968 pointed out that important agricultural legislation would expire at the end of 1970; it was expected that this would force new agricultural legislation in 1969. However, Congress and the Administration each waited for the other to act, and a new farm act was passed only late in 1970—after the elections, in fact. By and large, it continues for three years the major features of the previous act: farmer income remains heavily dependent on government programs for acreage production and payment levels, and relatively little has been done to improve the position of the lower-income and older farmers. Congress did not respond to the problems of low-income farmers; a Senate provision authorizing adjustment payments to small farmers who want to curtail their farming operations in favor of retirement or other employment was rejected. But a new provision does require the executive branch to report annually on planning and technical assistance, and overall government services available to rural people and communities.
The principal differences from the earlier act are as follows:
Cotton can be produced anywhere beginning in 1971, without regard to past acreage history. Penalties formerly attached to over-planting farm acreage allotments are no longer in effect. This will expand cotton production in the Mississippi Delta and the West, where the most efficient production areas are located, and reduce it in the old southeastern cotton belt. It is a move in the direction of more efficient land use.
Farmers will have more options in deciding what to produce. They may remain eligible for program benefits while harvesting any combination of crops on their farm, if they have set aside an acreage determined by the Secretary as necessary to balance overall farm output with requirements. This amendment broadens a key provision of the 1963 and 1965 acts which applied such a feature to wheat and feed grains, crops grown on nearly two-thirds of the cultivated cropland in the United States.
The maximum payment level of $55,000 per crop and per person will reduce federal spending and the unfavorable publicity arising out of a few payments of over $1 per person. Just over 1,000 farmers, mostly cotton growers, will be affected. Budgetary savings will be small, around $50 million a year, assuming the USDA administers the limitation firmly. This provision may represent a start, however, on more effective fiscal control over commodity programs.
Minimum price support levels for wheat and corn were fixed at $1.25 and $1.00 per bushel respectively, after eight years when the law allowed broader administrative discretion in these matters. The large prospective difference between wheat and corn price support levels will sometimes overvalue wheat, and could reduce its utilization as a feed grain.
Administrative discretion in setting acreage diversion requirements and payments to farmers was reduced in the new act. The Secretary's capacity for responsible program management and for budgetary control was thereby lessened. In promulgating the first specific provisions under the act, the Secretary of Agriculture commented that decisions on production would henceforth lie with producers rather than with government and that the former knew better how to make them. Perhaps it is the best way to free the government from any blame, should things not go well henceforth. But it is hardly an adequate description of what remains an uneasy ménage a trois: Congress, the department, and the farmer.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1971 issue of Resources magazine.
