AGRIBUSINESS THREATENS FAMILY FARM

(By Nick Kotz)

Joseph Weisshaar looks the part of Modern American Farmer, textbook version educated at Iowa State, conservative in speech and manner, efficient in the latest technology, industrious as a businessman, proudly independent.

He is 39 years old and grossed more than $100,000 last year selling hogs. He has presumably "made it." But in fact he is a troubled man, fearful that he and thousands of farmers like him in this country cannot survive the industrial and financial upheavals in American agriculture that have been brought about in recent years by the emergence of enormous "agribusiness" corporations.

So he has become a "militant" of sorts, a card-carrying member of the hellraising National Farmers Organization which is using collective bargaining, law suits, strikes, boycotts, crop dumping and even occasional violence to win higher farm prices for its growing membership.

The NFO's ultimate goal is to protect the "family farmers" of the world from forces over which they have minimal control-giant food chains, food manufacturers and conglomerates that are attempting to bring to agriculture the industrial bigness, efficiency and control that characterizes much of the American economy.

The threat to the "family farm," and the way of life it represents, is so strong that even the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest and most conservative farm organization, shows symptoms of upheaval. In the past, the AFB has consistently and vigorously opposed federal intervention in the farm economy. But today it is swallowing its ideology and asking for federal laws to strengthen individual farmers in dealing with the new corporate forces in agriculture.

The stakes in this struggle between farmers like Weisshaar and the giant new farm corporations are immense :

Food is the nation's largest business with $114 billion in annual retail sales. More than $8 billion in annual farm exports keep the U.S. balance of trade from becoming an economic disaster. The question of who in agriculture is to share in this bounty and on what terms is at the root of the NFO's militance and the Farm Bureau's philosophical turnaround.

Will the family farm survive in the years ahead? Or will agriculture become like steel, autos, and chemicals-an industry dominated by giant conglomerate corporations such as Tenneco, whose operations were described in an article yesterday? In that case, the nation will have lost its prized Jeffersonian ideal, praised in myth and song, of the yeoman farmer as the backbone of America.

What will become of rural America if the greatest migration in history-40 million to the cities in 50 years-is further accelerated? Farmers have provided the economic base of the small towns and that base is becoming perilously small.

What will be the effect of a rural wasteland on the American political system? The power of the farm lobby and the small towns, already in sharp decline, has traditionally provided a counterbalancing force to the politics of the big cities.

How will the nation's food supply be affected? Production efficiency of the family farmer and general affluence have made food a relative bargain in the United States. *

FAMILY UNITS DOWN

On all these questions, the symptoms are not encouraging for the family farm system. A million farms are eliminated every 10 years and only 2.9 million remain.

The average farmer today is 58 years old-compared to a median age of 38 for all Americans in the work force Young aspirants who would like to fill the retiring farmer's shoes can't get capital. And many who start farming soon quit, discouraged by low returns and mounting debts.

The contest between the family farmer and the conglomerates is, on the surface, incredibly unequal. There is Tenneco with its $4.3 billion in assets and its ability to employ its own land, tractors, pesticides, oil, processing plants, and marketing system. On the other side, there is Joe Weisshaar trying to hold on. Weisshaar has not quit, but he is perplexed about what it takes to earn a decent living farming.

GOAL REACHED

After 10 years applying the lessons taught him at agriculture college, Weisshaar last year reached his personal goal-the_magic circle of 50,000 farmers who sold at least $100,000 worth of farm products and produced one-third of the nation's food.

It was not a happy experience.

"I figured I would have it made when I reached the $100,000 mark," (in sales) says Weisshaar, 39, who farms 540 acres near Creston, Iowa, "but I ended up $1,300 further in debt. It seems like the bigger you get, the harder you fall. You depend heavily on credit and with one bad year of hog prices you are in deep trouble."

The Weisshaars have taken only one vacation in 10 years. The family bought only one costly item last year, a new refrigerator. Mary Jane Weisshaar, an attractive college graduate and mother of three young children, paid for it by driving a corn-hauling truck in a job that begins at 5 a.m.

"All that talk in the cities about free time and recreation?" questions Weisshaar. "I wonder whether we farmers aren't subsidizing that recreation."

With his credit already stretched to meet operating expenses, including payments on expensive farm machinery, Weisshaar must farm leased land, rather than buying his own.

"The doctor and lawyer uptown are buying up the farm land as a tax writeoff and a hedge against inflation," he complains. "When they get done with it, there is only one other place it can go-to the farm corporations."

INVESTMENT IN YOUTH

"This country is going to wake up one day and discover that the price of food has doubled," says Weisshaar's banker, Charles Ehm, who worries that young men can't get a start in farming. "We decided to start out five young farmers a year-a good investment for the bank and for the community. It's not working and it just tears my heart.

"The worst part of it is that they are not 'pool hall boys.' They work night and day. They are efficient, good farmers. I could name at least a half dozen who will sell out this winter, and they shouldn't have to."

Ehm says the family farm will soon disappear unless farmers get higher prices, and the government provides special financial credit for beginning farmers.

Weisshaar worries that Midwestern farming will be taken over by "vertically integrated" corporate farms, similar to ones that now dominate California agriculture.

While the Tennecos haven't yet moved into Iowa on the grand scale they have spread through California's central valleys, you can almost hear their footsteps. Feed manufacturers, processors and other corporations already have taken over poultry production, and are now applying similar tactics to move in on hog and cattle feeding-the midwestern farmer's best source of income.

Ralston Purina Co., a leader in the corporate takeover of poultry, has made a pitch to Weisshaar, offering to finance his hog operation, if Weisshaar will buy the corporation's feed and grow its hogs on contract. Remembering what happened to the once independent poultry grower, Weisshaar doesn't want that kind of partner. He doubts the advertisements of Kleen-Lean, Inc., the Ralston Purina subsidiary, which beckon him with "Swine Leasing Will Work for You."

THE PROFIT CHAIN

But Weisshaar is faced with a dilemma. If the processors and conglomerates gain control of hog and cattle feeding, then Midwestern family farmers will have to get all their income from growing corn, wheat, and soybeans. Farmers fear they cannot survive, if their only function is to provide grain for an integrated food system in which most profits are taken further up the food chain of animal feeding, processing, marketing and retail sales.

"It doesn't matter whether there are 500,000 of us left or 50,000," says the muscular but soft spoken Iowa farmer. "If we are powerless in the marketplace, we'll just keep on overproducing and killing each other off."

Out of this dilemma, the NFO arose and the Farm Bureau began rethinking its strategy. Farmers started turning up in unfamiliar places-with picket

signs at packing plant gates, and with highway barricades seeking to bar farm products from going to market at low prices.

The NFO plan for saving the family farmer includes legislation prohibiting farming by large conglomerate corporations, closing loopholes that promote taxloss farming by non-farmers, and providing easier financial credit for young farmers.

But the NFO has little confidence in getting help from a Congress in which the farm vote has shrunk into political insignificance.

Its basic strategy is to organize farmers into bargaining blocks of sufficient power to raise prices for their beef, hogs, grain, and other commodities. When buyers refuse to bargain or market prices get too low, the NFO tries to withhold commodities from the marketplace.

Weisshaar believes that an NFO-bargained contract with the John Morrell Co. will mean high prices this year for his hogs and better income to support his family.

"The NFO is the only hope we've got," he says. "We've got to block together our production and demand prices that will give us a decent living."

The Farm Bureau has called for relatively mild legislation that would require processors "to bargain in good faith" with farm groups representing a significant number of farmers. A three-man board, appointed by the President and approved by the Senate, would approve the farmer bargaining agents.

The Farm Bureau legislation, introduced by Rep. B. F. Sisk (D-Cal.), represents, at least in part, a response to the competition of the NFO.

BUSINESS BALKS

Several years ago the Farm Bureau organized voluntary bargaining associations, but learned to its surprise that its old friends and philosophical allies in agribusiness were not cooperative. Agribusiness corporations such as Campbell Soup Co., Green Giant Co., Del Monte Corp., and Pillsbury Co., flatly refused to sit down at the bargaining table.

Many Farm Bureau members suddenly looked at their prestigious organization in a different light. The Farm Bureau had built a $4-billion empire selling life insurance and supplies to farmers. But what, asked farmers, had the Farm Bureau done for them?

So John Kuhfuss, Illinois farmer and Farm Bureau President, went to a House Agriculture Subcommittee to complain. Agribusiness will not bargain with the Farm Bureau, he said, but insists on buying from individual farmers on "a takeit-or-leave-it basis-a one-sided process that is getting more one-sided as changes continue to occur in American agriculture."

Still another approach to increased farmer power is taken by advocates of giant cooperatives, which already are powerful in the dairy industry and in California citrus. The coops believe farmers must compete by creating their own vertically integrated systems of production, processing and marketing.

The giant dairy coops also seek to win higher prices under government-approved marketing orders by exercising political muscle in campaign financing. The dairy coops already have poured $170,000 into a 1972 Republican campaign chest for President Nixon's re-election.

"Agriculture is acting a great deal like the buggy whip industry acted at the turn of the century," says Eric Thor, director of the Agriculture Department's Farmers Cooperative Service and an advocate of giant, integrated coops. Instead of trying to reduce costs and sell cheaper buggy whips, says Thor, that outmoded industry should have become a manufacturer of fan belts or air cleaners.

Similarly, Thor says "the family farm could disappear" unless farmers compete collectively as processors and marketers of food. He believes farmers are wasting time concentrating all their energy on production efficiency, at a time when food industry profits are controlled in food marketing.

COOPS BIG TOO

Some farmers complain, however, that the "super coops" have become just another kind of conglomerate giant from which they get few benefits. For example, Sunkist Growers, Inc., which dominates 80 per cent of California citrus, is a many-layered, pyramid-shaped corporation. Small growers are at the bottom. Contrary to general knowledge, the processors at the top of this "super coop" include major private corporation as well as farmer-owner processors. Critics

contend that decisions are made and profits are taken at the top of the pyramid, with too little consideration paid to the economic interests of the small grower.

Iowa farmer Weisshaar is not eager to have his interests buried in such coops. "If I wanted to go into something like that," he says, "I would have gone into meat packing or the grovery business. I like being a farmer."

The various plans of farm groups to save the family farm face an uncertain future.

Their legislative and organizational prospects are seriously weakened by traditional divisions in their own ranks. The NFO is suspicious of the Farm Bureau and is itself distrusted as too "radical" by other farmers. The National Farmers Union, which represents midwestern grain producers, has its own legislative goals.

Other farmers, including cattlemen, fear that mandatory bargaining—a Farm Bureau proposals-will merely stimulate further vertical integration by the con. glomerates. Faced with the prospects of collective bargaining, giant meat packers, canners and sugar refiners may respond by growing even more of their own raw food materials.

It is difficult to design legislation to meet the differing problems of Iowa corn producers, California fruit growers.

Furthermore, the agriculture committees of Congress are confronted with new conflicts of interest. In the past, these committees had little trouble satisfying both big farmers and corporate food processors.

The big farmer and conglomerate both benefited from farm subsidy payments, a cheap labor supply, and foreign aid food programs.

But now the Senate and House Agriculture Committees are faced with difficult choices-resolving new conflicts between independent farmers and the corporations. Agribusiness, led by the National Canners Association, National Broiler Council, and the American Meat Institute strongly oppose bargaining legislation.

These committees give considerable weight-as do many economists-to the agribusiness argument that farm commodity prices are determined on a day-today basis in a highly competitive world market and that rigid bargaining legislaion might well weaken the ability of American agriculture to compete in world trade.

They are concerned, too, about maintaining the vigorous competition that now exists among food processors who fight for position in retail stores and who seek to satisfy shifting consumer preferences that often are geared to price. Processors want to retain this pricing flexibility and fear the rigidities that could come from enforced bargaining.

MANY LOBBYISTS

In terms of effective political power, 200 Washington lobbyists representing the food industry are far more influential than farmer lobbyists. Food processors have plants scattered all over urban America and can appeal to urban as well as rural Congressmen. For example, the Grocery Manufacturers of America maps out its legislative campaigns with charts showing the location of food plants in each congressional district.

"Most members of the agriculture committees wish this farm bargaining issue would just go away," says one agribusiness lobbyist. "Whatever they do, the politicians figure they will make one friend and six enemies."

The Nixon administration also feels and reflects the conflicting pressures from farmers and food manufacturers. The administration has tentatively supported the Farm Bureau Bargaining bill. But a high administration source confides:

"The White House owes a political debt to the Farm Bureau, but we aren't very enthusiastic about this legislation. If you look at our proposed qualifying amendments, you'll see there really isn't much left."

The political disputes and manuvering are still largely regarded by consumers, urban politicians, and the news media as intramural issues involving "the farm problem."

But the broadest issue involves the future shape of America and of its rural communities.

There is the strong, compelling desire in rural America to maintain the family farm and the small town.

Joe Weisshaar questions whether a way of life his family loves will be replaced by another industrialized system, administered by the forces of big labor and big industry.

And migrant farm workers, struggling to organize, question whether society does not have some obligation to help the lowest-paid worker who is being replaced by machines.

WHY BIGNESS?

Creston banker Charley Ehm asks: "Why is this country so obsessed with bigness? Why can't a young fellow farm 300 acres and make a living? We need to replace the economists and corporate planners with someone who has a concern for human beings."

Even assuming that industrial agriculture can be more efficient, Don Paarlberg, the Agriculture Department's chief economist, says: "People are asking, whether in as affluent a country as the United States, efficiency should be the sole criterion for the form of agriculture we are going to have. We now supply ourselves with food-the best diet ever, anywhere, with 17 per cent of our income. How much is it worth to drive that percentage down to 15 or 12 or 10? "Should we sacrifice a form of agricultural production that has served us well, that has produced good people as well as good crops and livestock?" Paarlberg had no answer for the question.

U.S. POLICY HANDCUFFS SMALL FARMER

(By Nick Kotz)

Tereso Morales has struggled all his life at the bottom of the richest agricultural system in history. Since he was nine years old, he has stooped in fields from Oregon to Texas, harvesting wealth owned by big farmers, retail food chains, canners and now, by agribusiness conglomerates.

Morales, 35, is still breaking his back in the fields, but with new purpose. His mind is now fired with a dream at sharing in some of the riches of American agriculture. He has joined with 30 other migrant workers and small farmers to grow strawberries in Watsonville, Calif. He hopes to earn $10,000 a year to raise his 11-member family in someplace other than a labor camp or a big city slum.

The 31 families of Cooperativa Compesina in many ways symbolize the problems and aspirations of 13 million poor rural Americans. They are among the 1.5 million small farmers and more than one million migrants who now work the land at far less than poverty-level incomes. They contribute to national statistics one-half of the nation's poverty and substandard housing.

The cooperative movement may give some of these people a way out of poverty. But the odds on their success are small.

They are competing-like the "family farmers" of the country-against powerful, efficient and aggressive "agribusiness" corporations that have moved into American agriculture on a large scale.

Morales and the other families of Cooperativa Compesina, for example, are competing in the California strawberry market with Tenneco, Inc., a $4.3 billion conglomerate corporation, and with S. S. Pierce Co., which both grows and distributes its own brand of premium-priced foods.

They are competing, in a larger sense, with political forces that have shaped federal agricultural policies in ways that favor the largest and most efficient interests in agriculture.

For more than 35 years to take the most obvious case in point-American industrial workers have been represented by powerful labor unions that have secured minimum wage legislation, unemployment compensation, child labor regulations, workmen's compensation for injuries on the job, collective bargaining right and so on. Farm workers, like Morales, generally enjoy none of these rights and benefits.

UNDERCUT BY GOVERNMENT

When the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, led by Cesar Chavez, sought to achieve some of the same benefits, government responded by undercutting the movement with policies permitting employers to import cheap labor from Mexico and Puerto Rico. When Chavez and his union sought to gain bargaining rights with a retail boycott of grapes and lettuce, the Defense Department increased its purchases of grapes and lettuce.