Associated Press | June 12, 2001 | By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press Writer
Kansas farmers once embraced the 1996 farm bill with its tantalizing promise of planting flexibility.
At last, growers figured they would be able to put in the crops best suited for the markets and their own land rather than farm the government programs with the same old commodities.
They bought into the premise that declining government subsidies would be replaced by greater profits in the marketplace.
As lawmakers begin drafting a new farm bill, that farm policy - popularly known as Freedom To Farm - is under intense scrutiny after years of emergency government bailouts to keep family farms and rural economies afloat.
But the beleaguered farm program has changed the rural landscape in Kansas. Fields that once grew wheat in eastern Kansas now grow a rotation of corn, sorghum and soybeans. A fledgling cotton industry has emerged in southern Kansas.
Farmers planted less wheat. Bountiful harvests of corn and sorghum overfilled grain elevators, dotting western Kansas each fall with huge mounds of grain piled on the ground.
But market prices collapsed in a nation awash in surplus grain. And the political parties, as well as farmers themselves, are deeply divided on whether to scrap the concept of freedom to farm.
The average Kansas farm last year would not have broken even except for federal subsidies. Kansas Farm Management Association reported that the typical farm received $45,614 in government payments in 2000 - or 116 percent of its net farm income.
A year earlier, the average government payment was $47,056. In 1997, government payments averaged $14,980 per farm.
Fred Ditrixhe raises wheat, milo, soybeans, sunflowers and calves on a farm east of Concordia. He said if he had not gotten the additional government payments he would have had to sell out.
He works the land his father and grandfather once tilled, but most of the 2,000 acres he farms is rented ground. To make up for low commodity prices, he has planted all his acres. Sometimes he longs for the old farm programs where the government paid farmers not to plant all their acres.
"When we used to have set-asides, it wasn't so bad. Now we are trying to grow a crop on every bit of those acres," he said. "For me, it has gotten more stressful."
Ditrixhe also tried different ways to add value to his crops. He got into raising calves to better use the cheap milo he grows. He grows the new hard white winter wheat in the hopes he can get a better price for his wheat crop. He has even tried raising confectionary sunflowers.
"I love to farm - you have to to do it. I'm working from 7 in the morning until 9 at night, hardly see the wife and kids," he said. "... I just want not to be a failure. I'm worried about being a failure."
Duane Hund is a northeast Kansas farmer who makes an off-farm living by counseling other struggling farmers as a farm analyst for Kansas State University Extension Service.
He recently sat down with a Kansas farm couple and their lender at their home in Nemaha County near the Nebraska state line.
"I am willing to put a Band-Aid on this thing until next winter," the lender told the farm couple, "But we are going to have to see what Congress is going to come up with."
If Congress does not come up with something different for a new farm bill, they would have to make some hard choices, the banker told them.
"The 63-year-old farmer and his wife were sitting there and he just broke down and started crying," Hund said.
It is a scene that Hund has been seen repeated a lot lately.
"Lenders are willing to allow the process politically to develop before they say for sure to that family, 'You have to retire and get out.'"
Wheat acres have generally declined in Kansas in the past few years. In 1994, Kansas farmers planted 11.9 million acres in wheat. Last fall they planted just 9.9 million acres.
At the same time, acres planted for other major crops went up.
The current farm program also allowed producers to change crop rotations without risking their eligibility - a move that has allowed them to do a better job with the conservation plans, Hund said.
Freedom to farm also enabled people to try out on small scales some different things that they might not have attempted under the old farm program, he said.
Among the most visible is the burgeoning cotton industry that has taken hold in southern Kansas, where cotton acreage has increased from 1,400 acres in 1994 to 40,000 acres last year.
But perhaps the most immediate impact of the current policy is that it has given farmers in Kansas and elsewhere the freedom to grow as much as they want without forgoing their eligibility for government programs.
"We produced ourselves into the economic gutter," said Tom Giessel, a Larned farmer. "We are overproducing. Now market prices are low and are going to stay low; and contrary to economic law, the cheaper grain gets,the more farmers try to produce."
No clear consensus exists that any government program can be blamed entirely for low commodity prices - or many other changes in agriculture also driven in part by new crop varieties and economics.
After all, Kansas farmers planted fewer wheat acres in recent years but still often set record production levels because of good yields. In some years that helped offset the poor wheat prices as markets plunged during bountiful harvests. But this year - as wheat growers face a dismal harvest - prices remain low.
Nor has the latest government version of a farm program stopped the exodus of farmers leaving the family farm.
Last year, the number of Kansas farmers dropped from 65,000 to 64,000, according to Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service. Most of those getting out sold to bigger farm operations, leaving about the same amount of land on Kansas farms, about 47.5 million acres.
Hund, for one, is not sure the policy has not done anything that would not have occurred anyway in agriculture.
Kansas farmers got $1.4 billion in farm program payments in 1999, and $1.2 billion in 2000, according to Kansas Farm Service Agency.
As the new executive director of the Kansas Farm Service Agency, Bill Fuller is responsible for administering farm program payments in Kansas.
He said farmers support the concept of farming for the market and growing the crops they want to grow, but are frustrated and financially hurting because of low prices.
But not even farmers themselves can agree whether Freedom to Farm has been a good thing. Two of the state's biggest farm groups - Kansas Farm Bureau and Kansas Farmers Union - have taken opposite stands on it.
Since the outset of the program, Kansas Farmers Union has supported the market-oriented approach to production agriculture, said Patty Clark, public policy director for the group.
The farm program has some shortcomings, particularly in the lack of a safety net when prices are low, she said. And there has not been the free and open trade that had been promised when the bill was passed.
Wheaton farmer Donn Teske said the current farm bill allowed him to convert to organic farming in the last two years. He now grows pumpkins and vegetables in addition to the more traditional beef, soybeans, milo and legumes. But it is his off-farm job as the new president of Kansas Farmers Union that pays the family bills.
"The Kansas Farmers Union is not happy with the current structure at all - we consider Freedom to Farm to be a failure and question whether agriculture can survive another five years under a similar bill," he said.Associated Press:
