by Don Deichman

The audience-again, policy beneficiaries-appreciated dismissiveness as a form of denial. But also present-like my friend who told of the incident-were some farm-raised bureaucrats and others who know that aiming only a global competitiveness, not at putting prices farmers receive in reasonable balance (parity) with other prices, is an error with far-reaching consequences. Deny it or not.

After the event’s opening, the reported 1200 people attending divided into sessions with titles like: “Acceptance of Agricultural Biotechnology in World Trade,” and “U.S. Farm Women: Leaders In Rural Prosperity.” (There’s one lots of farm women would be curious about!) In the 1980’s, when some American Agriculture Movement members still had the stomach (and money) to attend USDA Outlooks, questions from the floor were probing...and not easily dismissed.

A session titled “Issues and Strategies for Rural and Community Prosperity” featured an Iowa rural development director whose comments included: “The last official rural policy we had in this country was in 1908, the Country Life Commission.” I wanted to remind the audience of this: While the New Deal was broader than a “rural policy,” it was commonly known that putting grain and livestock prices in balance with other prices was a leading and key element of the New Deal.

At the next session I attended, there was a colorful speaker named Paul Hitch, whose family feedlots, he said ship about 300 thousand head of cattle per year. His remark that most drew my attention was this: “There are people who view (market consolidation) as an evil conspiracy to screw the farmer. But, in fact it is market forces at work.”

I asked Hitch if he didn’t think something MORE than market forces was behind the subsidized grain prices that he and other livestock feeders enjoy. He answered: “you’re wandering off into farming, which is another topic.” That was a denial, of course, but then he slipped into real answers (the danger of outside-the-beltway speakers) that at least acknowledged subsidy lowers grain prices: “I don’t know that it’s all that good for me when corn is cheap;” and ‘subsidies have kept grain farmers in business.” But he held to his free trade “market forces” illusion, and said a farm bill amendment by South Dakota Senator Johnson limiting packer cattle feeding is a “horrid idea.”