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Ford's farm legacy lives on in new farm bill debateBy Larry Dreiling The Boxing Day death of former president Gerald Ford brought to mind my days as a 16-year old wannabe reporter, sitting in the den of our house in the Denver suburbs watching a rough color image of Ford declaring our long national nightmare as being over while my family began the plans to move to Kansas two years later. During the state funeral for the 38th resident, my high definition big screen was alive with sights of now aging lions that made up Ford's cabinet. One of the eulogists was Henry Kissinger, who quite rightly said, "Historians will debate for a long time over which president contributed most to victory in the cold war. Few will dispute that the cold war could not have been won had not Gerald Ford emerged at a tragic period to restore equilibrium to America and confidence in its international role." It's been over five years since I was there for a conference, but I remember vividly how reporters in Finland connected we U.S. reporters with Gerald Ford. Kissinger, too, brought up the Helsinki accords that were signed at the 1975 European Security Conference, establishing universal standards for human rights, which Kissinger indicated are now generally accepted as having hastened the collapse of the former Soviet empire. One man who was missing from that fold gathered as honorary pallbearers was an appointee of President Nixon who remained in Ford's cabinet and who is now our oldest living former Cabinet secretary, Earl Butz, who was secretary of agriculture. Butz, now 96 years old and a professor emeritus at Purdue University, became the butt of plenty of jokes in his days as secretary of agriculture under both Presidents Ford and Nixon. I don't know how many times my dad, sitting in his recliner at our home in Hays, laughed at Johnny Carson's "Earl the Pearl" routines in his nightly monologues about how Butz would open his mouth and insert his foot. Whether it was criticizing Pope Paul VI personally and the Catholic Church in general for their stand on birth control, or telling reporters an insulting remark about African Americans, Butz, despite holding a PhD in ag economics, showed a diplomatic streak as rough as a cob from a corn field in his native Indiana. Unfortunately, Butz's beliefs that became Ford administration policies, we later learned, were no joke. Ford called the policy "full farm production coupled with fair prices for the consumer and good income for farmers through the sales of their products." Free of Washington jargon, that's called planting fencerow to fencerow. Under an avalanche of bin-busting production, Butz believed, producers would see higher prices because Nixon's and Ford's trade policies would open new markets, the continuation of the wheat agreement with the Soviets being one of them. Even though he constantly called for markets free from government interference, Butz created farm policy as we know it today, with farm payments linked to yield rather than to acreage. Butz's "Get big or get out" cry, encouraging producers to borrow significant amounts of cash, often is considered the death knell for smaller farms that were foreclosed upon during the crisis of the 1980s. One of our regular columnists, Ken Root, who was a mentor to this then fledgling broadcaster right after the Carter administration and a friend to this more veteran reporter today, has often encouraged me to read anything I can about the life of Oren Lee Staley, who was then president of the National Farmers Organization. In researching Staley's life I remember reading how it crossed swords with Butz's, for at Butz's confirmation hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Staley said Butz "is widely known among farmers for his callous lack of concern about their welfare." Even the National Farmers Union, which had never before opposed any cabinet nominee, opposed Butz. Did they know something we didn't at those hearings? Eventually, Butz's tongue was caught in the bear trap of public opinion once too often. Ford accepted Butz's resignation only a month before Election Day 1976. The day before his 72nd birthday, on July 2, 1981, Butz surrendered to Federal authorities at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago to serve 30 days of a five-year sentence for income-tax evasion. The rest of Butz's sentence was spent on probation after he paid a $10,000 fine and over $61,000 in civil penalties. Butz's legacy, and dare I say Nixon's and Ford's legacy in farm policy, is that as farmers got bigger they had to get more creative if they wanted to survive. Eventually, corn farmers wound up planting more of their product for high fructose corn syrup, which replaced beet and cane sugar as the primary sweetener in soft drinks. This legacy should be a teaching moment for all of us who follow farm policy as we head into debate over the 2007 farm bill. We need to be thinking not just about short-term solutions to whatever ails rural America. We can't prove the big city papers right and get "greedy." Instead, we need to take a long look at where we want our agriculture and how we want rural America to look like in 2012, when the next farm bill will be debated. We need to consider unintended consequences of our policies. In hindsight, the Nixon/Ford/Butz route in ag policy wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. It will be up to policy makers--and all of us who care about the rural America--to make sure we learn from history and don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117 or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com. Date: 1/3/07
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