MISSOURI WATCH: CAN HAROLD SAVE THE OLD HOME PLACE?

Although he failed to save his seat in the U.S. Congress at the last election, former U.S. Rep. Harold Volkmer, the pride of Hannibal, now heads a 27-member commission that has set out to save the country's family farms. Or at least make known how to go about saving them.

We hate to be negative, but Harold and his cohorts won't succeed.

The Volkmer commission's efforts, irrespective of high-minded intentions, will prove futile, just as have past efforts, and there are several reasons for this prediction.

The first is that it is virtually impossible to get 27 individuals to come to a consensus on a subject such as family farming. It will be surprising if Volkmer, who had trouble agreeing with himself while in the Missouri General Assembly, can get his gang even to agree on how to define a "family farm." Yet without a tight definition the exercise is pointless.

The second reason for pessimism has to do with political atmosphere. The nation is hardly in a mood for taking substantive political action of any kind. A good example is campaign finance reform.

A third reason is different. It is philosophical, dealing with the dilemma or contradiction that liberal and open societies which exalt the place of the individual depend for their very existence on those individuals' acceptance of social discipline necessary for the system's defense. Farmers are as capable as anyone else of disregarding the maxim that everyone goes his own way, which in turn produces factionalism.

In today's dog-eat-dog world, cannibalism prevails. Many farmers are more interested in buying each other out than in enabling the system to survive. A friend and top economist with the University of Missouri extension service, Dr. Harold Breimyer, calls the conflict between individual and collective interest the "fallacy of composition." He means the fallacy is that whatever appears good for the individual may not be good for the whole and may actually circle back to haunt the individual himself.

To prove validity of the Breimyer Principle, consider income tax loopholes. It's high fashion these days to downplay direct subsidies and instead wangle new tax breaks. These are attractive proportionate to an individual's tax bracket. Most family farmers are in middle or lower brackets and have less to gain than their high-bracket competitors. To put it bluntly, load farm income tax rules without enough concessions and all landholding will eventually end up in the hands of very wealthy individuals and agribusiness corporations.

What, then, will determine the future place of the family farm, a question that holds great ramifications for Missouri which ranks only below Texas in total number of farms? Today, as in the past, the viability of individual proprietorship farming, a term that is really preferable to family farming, rests on terms of access to (1 . ) land, (2. ) operating capital, (3. ) talent and (4. ) satisfactory markets.

If we do not want to let land ownership be determined solely by inheritance, and prefer to keep it accessible to talented young farmers, among needed policy measures would be steeply progressive estate taxes (low on family-sized holdings and high on mega-sized units) and providing state or federal supervised credit available at minimum interest rates. With regard to access to operating funds various forms of cooperative credit can be beneficial, as they have been in the past.

Land grant universities, such as the University of Missouri, agricultural experiment stations and state and federal extension services have compiled an exceptional record of making knowledge freely available and developing successive generations of bright, energetic farmers. The so-called industrialization of agriculture alters this pattern more than is generally recognized -- knowledge creation is more and more becoming commercially privatized .

The most ominous limitation threatening family-farm agriculture lies in denied access to markets. The proprietary farm is market-oriented. Agribusiness takeovers and ownership -- or contractual integration undercut the ability of the family farmer to earn a living. Will the Volkmer commission take this issue on? Don't bet the farm on it.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.