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NELSON LOBBIES FOR FARM AID

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Times Staff Writer

As the entertainment media began to focus this weekend on central Illinois, the trench fighting to save the family farm was here, 700 miles to the east.

Following Farm Aid organizer Willie Nelson’s personal lobbying effort, the Senate Agriculture Committee voted 10-6 Thursday to renew federal farm price supports and income protection scheduled to end in nine days.

Organizers hope the Farm Aid concert will raise $50 million this weekend. But, the committee’s Farm Aid bill sent to the Senate floor would deliver as much as $50 billion to farmers over the next four years.

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The huge appropriation is under fire from the White House, however, with a deficit-conscious President Reagan openly vowing to veto the measure should it get through the full Congress during the next two weeks.

Despite his folksy approach, singer Nelson was fully aware of this Senate-Presidential tug-of-war when he opted to put in an appearance before Agriculture Committee members. Nelson, pop star Neil Young and country-Western entertainer John Conlee met privately for 30 minutes with key senators before posing outside the committee’s meeting room for photographers.

While drawling for reporters about his cotton-picking and hog-raising days on a Texas farm, Nelson did not miss the opportunity to lobby before the television news cameras.

“This is going to bring a lot of attention to the farmers’ problems,” Nelson said.

Young went further, accusing urban America of “destroying the family farm.” Despite Administration predictions that farm reform legislation would balloon the national debt, Young proclaimed that saving family farms with federal funds “doesn’t create any more deficit than we already have.

“It’s not subsidies,” Young said. “It allows the farmer to stand up and support himself on his own two feet.”

But the plowman of Nelson’s and Young’s memories is an anachronism, according to the Department of Agriculture.

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Among the 2.3 million farms in the country, the department classifies 680,000 as “family” operations with annual crop sales ranging from $50,000 to $500,000--a far cry from Willie Nelson’s dirt-poor Texas cotton patch of three decades ago.

The department estimates that more than one-fifth of these family farms are “technically insolvent.” They, like many other farmers, got into financial trouble during the late 1970s, when money supplies were tight and interest rates were high.

Ironically, the high productivity that has given the American corn belt the nickname of “the world’s breadbasket” has resulted in prices too low to cover farmers’ payments on their high-interest mortgages and other loans.

The Agriculture Department estimates that at the end of 1984 the total farm debt reached $212 billion--4,000 times more than what Nelson and other concert organizers hope to raise. Furthermore, agricultural experts believe the farming crisis is getting worse. Once again this year, agronomists are predicting record production of wheat, corn and other grains in much of America’s heartland. When the autumn’s bumper crops get to market, however, the glut is expected to drive down prices even further.

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