Fight Over Farm Bill Sows Seeds of Division in GOP : Budget: Measure is gauge of commitment to reducing deficit. Subsidy backers say agriculture already squeezed.

The prairie wind blowing across southwest Kansas is heavy with the pungent aroma of tilled earth and cow manure. But something else is in the air this spring: a faint whiff of fear and anger wafting from the feedlots and wheat fields in the general direction of Washington, D.C.

The fear reflects a growing recognition that members of Congress are moving to slash the price supports and other subsidies doled out to farmers and ranchers for decades, a move that could further erode the viability of that most American of institutions: the family farm.

The anger is directed at a new Republican-dominated Congress in which traditional support for farm subsidies has sunk to new lows, with some former allies now talking about the inevitability of scaling back Washington’s financial commitment to their rural constituents.

“I’m embarrassed that farmers are treated as second-class citizens, and I’m angered because this country has become so spoiled by the ability of the American farmer to produce,” Nebraska corn grower Gary Goldberg told House Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) during a recent hearing in Roberts’ hometown of Dodge City, once an icon of America’s frontier tradition but now a case study in the precarious economics of modern agriculture. “It is taken for granted that no matter what you do to us, we will continue to grow and sell our commodities below our cost of production.”

Behind Goldberg, a crowd of about 1,000 farmers, ranchers, rural bankers and food processors grunt their approval. For Roberts and other GOP lawmakers who are calling the shots on Capitol Hill, the animosity emanating from this sea of overalls and John Deere caps drives home a perplexing--and perilous--political challenge: How can a Republican defend expensive government subsidy programs that owe their existence to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in an age of raging fiscal conservatism and free-market evangelism on Capitol Hill?

In communities across the Farm Belt, grizzled ranch hands and mud-caked farmers tend to set their jaws and nod with conviction when talk turns to such GOP priorities as balancing the federal budget and reforming the social welfare system. But try proposing a big reduction in the $11 billion paid to farmers each year in the form of “deficiency payments,” or suggest--as some Republicans have--that these subsidies are simply welfare by another name, and you’ll get a welcome about as warm as a howling prairie winter.

“We have to convince the American people that food is not produced in a grocery store,” fumed John Swayze, a farmer from nearby Bucklin, Kan. “We have to convince Congress we’re not just a special interest.”

In Washington, the fight between those intent on cutting farm subsidies and those bent on protecting them has riven normally united Republicans. It has divided rural lawmakers from the growing population of urban and suburban House members, congressional newcomers from Capitol Hill’s old bulls. It has allied the White House with past foes, and brought together unlikely bedfellows from both ends of the political spectrum.

It will all come to a head soon when Congress begins debate on the 1995 farm bill, a massive piece of legislation that only comes up for consideration once every five years.

“This is a real test for the Republicans,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a liberal Democrat who opposes farm subsidies. “They’re in power now, and when you contrast what they’re doing in agriculture now with their rhetoric, this is a real challenge.”

Indeed, the 1995 farm bill has become what one congressional aide calls “a test of true GOP manhood,” a defining issue that will gauge the depth of Republican commitment to reducing the federal budget deficit and substituting free-market solutions for government intervention.

In addition, it has become a test of the remaining strength of a battered but still-potent special interest--the farm lobby--against a growing group of lawmakers who have stronger allegiances to the twin goals of balancing the budget and shrinking the government than to preserving the economic health of a dwindling slice of the American population.

On one side of this shootout is Dodge City’s Roberts--on the one hand, a devoted conservative, and on the other, a self-proclaimed “bully-pulpit champion of production agriculture” and defender of most crop-support programs. Opposite him is Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, presidential aspirant and a proponent of significant cuts in the payments farmers receive to grow such mega-crops as wheat, soybeans, corn and cotton.

Allied with Lugar is no less a power than House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.), an archconservative who in 1990 called the federal farm program one of the “American monuments to the folly of central planning” and “a stubborn pocket of resistance to the Reagan Revolution,” and ultra-liberal Democrats from urban districts such as Reps. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Frank, who calls agriculture programs “the most over-regulated, anti-consumer, anti-free-market programs we have.”

While Armey has proposed an outright end to farm subsidies, Lugar is seeking to scale back federal payments to farmers by $15 billion--roughly a third--over the next five years as part of a plan “to move agriculture toward market-oriented production and save taxpayer dollars.” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) wants to go even further, by cutting $45 billion over seven years from the agriculture budget, which includes food stamps.

But Roberts and his allies in the White House assert that price supports, slated to shrink by 1.4% between 1991 and 1997, already have taken their hits and should be spared further cuts.

“We already gave at the office,” said Roberts, echoing a rejoinder heard regularly in the nation’s farm communities. “To those who say we are trying to dodge the draft and avoid taking cuts, let me tell you, we should get Purple Hearts.”

Lugar finds this sort of protectiveness easy to explain: “It’s a very simple business: It’s a matter of political self-preservation,” he said. “It was one thing to be in favor of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. But when you’re meeting with real, live people who are unhappy about the cuts it’ll take to get there, this is no longer a theoretical exercise.”

Previous reductions in farm programs have contributed to a significant shift in the agricultural economy, forcing some small farmers out of business and fostering greater concentration of farms in large agribusiness companies. For the Clinton Administration--and for lawmakers whose districts are populated by family farmers who depend on federal deficiency payments--the trend has gone far enough.

“I don’t believe that we ought to destroy the farm-support program if we want to keep the family farm,” Clinton said recently as he opened a rural conference convened by the White House.

Farmers, say many experts, are becoming the political victims of their own success. Although they help feed the nation and the world, farmers represent less than 2% of the U.S. work force, and only 556 of the nation’s 3,095 counties are considered farm-dependent. While the farm and food sector generates about 16% of the nation’s wealth and a trade surplus of $17.1 billion per year, agriculturists represent a dwindling segment of the nation.

Their representatives in Congress, in turn, constitute a shrinking bloc of votes on Capitol Hill. Newer members are unlikely to have been exposed to the mind-boggling intricacies of the farm bill, or be sympathetic to the historical dependencies of farmers.

Many first-term lawmakers were sent to Washington by suburban constituents. They tend to be more devoted to broader conservative objectives, such as balancing the budget, than to protecting what they consider entrenched interests.

At the heart of the debate is an array of crop-support programs created in 1938 as temporary emergency measures to help end the Depression and aid victims of the Dust Bowl. Designed to assure farmers a minimum price for certain crops, they use a variety of tools--government loans, production controls and direct cash payments--to keep farmers on the land.

Today, agricultural-support programs have an impact on almost everything on the nation’s dinner table, from milk to sugar to grains. Because they also shore up the price of animal feed, the programs influence the price and availability of meat.

Last year, the price tag for those supports added up to $10.3 billion.

Ideologically, farm subsidies represent a stark challenge to Congress’ new crop of free-market conservatives. Armey once described commodity-support programs as a perversion of the free market that create artificial surpluses and shortages, justify further government intervention and boost food prices to consumers by $10 billion a year.

Indeed, many farmers chafe at what they consider government-induced pressures to “farm the system”--growing whatever will bring them the highest federal subsidies rather than letting market forces dictate what crops they raise. But rather than killing subsidies, they want the government to hand out money with fewer strings attached.

Besides the support programs, GOP budgeteers are taking aim at other Agriculture Department programs. One is the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive lands out of cultivation. At a cost of $18 billion over 10 years, the program has idled 36.4 million acres nationwide, and reached into almost 80% of all counties in the nation. In many rural counties, it has become a major source of income.

Another is the Export Enhancement Program, which helps farmers market their crops abroad. Totaling some $3.4 billion over five years, it is a “costly subsidy” that has not helped to increase the world market share for U.S. farm commodities, Lugar says.

But the really big money in the farm bill does not go directly to farmers. Instead, it is channeled to the nation’s poor in the form of food stamps and other domestic nutrition programs that account for 63% of the Agriculture Department’s budget. Without cutting deeply into those programs, experts say, the government will not be able to achieve the kind of spending reductions mandated by the powerful House and Senate budget committees.

Most farmers are staunch supporters of nutrition programs because they help prop up prices by increasing demand. The simple arithmetic of that relationship has forged a powerful political alliance of urban and rural lawmakers that dates back to the mid-1970s. In an effort to shore up support for subsidies, farm interests persuaded Congress to put the Agriculture Department in charge of federal nutrition programs, including food stamps.

According to Frank, “that deal has eroded essentially; it’s broken down.” Farmers, he said, “are still getting the benefit of it,” but urban lawmakers who helped protect agriculture programs to get farmers’ support for welfare spending now recognize they’re not getting much in return.

For the farmers and ranchers packed into Dodge City’s cavernous hearing hall, the setbacks in Washington are just another blow to a vocation already filled with hardship and, in their view, rewarded with little appreciation by consumers who enjoy the cheapest and most plentiful food supply of any nation.

“We get droughts and floods and blight and pests,” said Albert Albers, who raises wheat on 1,000 acres in Ness County, Kan. “But one of the biggest problems we have right now is a lack of morale, a feeling of futility. Our costs keep trending up and our profits keep trending down.”