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'The bins and silos arc full af grain acquired by the Federal Government under its price support program*. So are 96 of the ships riding at moorings in the James. So are storage units across the nation. Handling and storing surplus agricultural commodites is costing taxpayers approximately $3 million a day„_jnore than $1 bllion a year. We are spending about $6 billion a year in federal money trying to help tfie farmer, and nearly $5 billion of it is going for a conflicting combination of programs which include, on the one hand, such devices aimed at restricting production as the acreage allotments and the costly soil bank experiment and, on the other, such encouragements to intensified production as price support payments.
It is costing us, for example, more than eight times as much just to handle and store surplus farm commodities *as it is to perform all of the watershed protection and related work of the Soil Conservation Service. 1
Shuttling these surpluses around the country, to sell them af a loss, give them away or store them until we can figure out what to do with them, is running up an annual freight bill approaching the entire cost of the Agricultural Conservation Program, under which individual 'farmers receive assistance in applying approved soil-conserration practices. v
Neither price supports nor the soil bank have been of great importance to the fanners of our section of Virginia, of course, but they, together with all other taxpayers, are sharing the cost of applying these measures on a large scale in the so-called single-crop areas of the Nation.
It has been estimated that nearly 80 per cent of all the private grainstorage space in the United States is being used to bold governmentowned grain. Five companies at mong the many storing this surrilne are r reel vine* about $500,000
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