LETTERS: FARMERS NEED CONTROLS ON PRODUCTION

To the editor:

It's about time our leaders in agriculture and government get their heads out of the sand and realize that the 1996 Freedom to Farm Bill can't and won't work until some controls are put on the products we farmers produce.

When Newt Gingrich's committee wrote the 1996 bill, it forgot something farmers have, and that is greed. Farmers trying to make ends meet will all produce more, which drives the prices of our products down still more. We are competing with third-class nations. Some leaders say we need the world markets.

I heard someone say that we are selling grain to Japan and Korea. Then two weeks ago, China undercut the American price by $10 a ton, so we lost that market. The western corn belt has a lot of grain to moved to people like Smithfield Foods and Memphis Farms, which each have 350,000-plus sows and own that hog till you check out the meat at the supermarket.

So with the cheap corn and bean prices, what difference does it make if hogs sold by small producers only bring 7 cents a pound or $20 to $30 each and the retail value of that hag is over $350? They sure didn't drop the price to the consumer.

We farmers are a lot like a bunch of 5- and 6-year-old kids. Give them a bag of candy and see what they will do with it if no controls or rules are applied.

The old farm bill worked for 60 years. Sure, it had some loopholes. But what bills have our government ever written that didn't have loopholes?

Farm prices won't get better until controls are put on our products. Stop worrying that we need the world markets to survive, and set our prices.

Every nation that turned its back to agriculture or farmers and let them go under also collapsed.

When sales for Case and John Deere dropped this summer, they both dropped production by better than 25 percent. We farmers have to do the same thing, and the can only be done by the controllers on the farm products we produce.

VERNON GREBING

Frohna