“Agriculture know-nothings,” he calls them, for starters. And urban dolts who think food comes from stores, not from Kansas. He means people who do not know that (let typography suggest his tone) ONLY FARM PROGRAMS HAVE DECLINED AN AVERAGE OF 9 PERCENT ANNUALLY SINCE 1985 AND ARE GOING TO GO ON DECLINING. Take that, all you “who complain about agriculture with your mouths full,” you “well-fed, arm-chaired, behind-the-lines generals who allege that somehow the aggies have been dodging the budget draft.”
Roberts represents western Kansas’s First District, “The Big First” that includes 66 counties in its 63,091 square miles. It could hold Illinois, with plenty of room left over for Connecticut. This district, which produces more wheat than any state, was giddy with delight on election night when it realized that Roberts, who was hanging out at the Silver Spur eatery in Dodge, was going to become chairman of the Agriculture Committee. Now he is gunning for people who enjoy “using the farmer as a public utility on behalf of foreign policy [if you supported President Carter’s grain embargo you’ve got ’til sundown to get out of Dodge], environmental objectives and to control food costs.”
With the fraying patience of a man weary of teaching fundamentals to city hicks, Roberts lays out the numbers. The Department of Agriculture’s estimated outlays for fiscal 1995 – $62.3 billion – are barely 4 percent of the federal budget. Just 16 percent of that 4 percent – 0.6 percent of federal outlays – go for commodities programs. Most Agriculture outlays – 63 percent – are for food stamps and other nutrition programs. So there.
Roberts doesn’t cotton to having his conservative credentials questioned. Referring to the card by which House members vote electronically, Roberts says, “If I vote “yes’ the card jumps back up and says, “Are you sure?”’ And his political pedigree runs back to the springtime of the Republican Party.
In 1952, when his father headed up Citizens for Eisenhower, 16-year-old Pat attended the Republican Convention in Chicago where Eisenhower beat Taft for the nomination. Because Pat was wearing i like ike buttons, a Taft supporter asked him, derisively, how long he had been a Republican. Big mistake. Roberts answered that his great-grandfather in Ohio had stood in 1856 in his front yard, waving an American flag as John C. Fremont, the first Republican presidential candidate, rode by. Four years later the great-grandfather took his Bible, his pistol and his abolitionist views to “Bleeding Kansas” and founded what is now the state’s second oldest newspaper.
After a stint in the Marine Corps, young Pat did some journalism in Arizona, then spent 14 years as a staffer on Capitol Hill. He was elected to Congress in 1980. Only about 2 percent of America’s work force is in agriculture, but Roberts says aggies saved the Republic last November: 31 of the 73 freshman Republicans have agriculture sectors in their districts. Now they must preside over the further shrinking of the complex relationship of government and agriculture.
Farmers are (to borrow a Robertsism) like the turtle that pokes its head out of its shell and sees that it is on top of a fence post: it is not sure how it got there but knows it must have had a lot of help. Farmers have had a lot of government help. In 1862, when the federal government had rather a lot on its plate, it still found time to pass the Morrill Land Grant Act, creating a system of “mechanical and agricultural” colleges that did much to make agriculture scientifically intensive. Today it is hard to get through a meal without eating something from California’s Central Valley. God did not make that valley. He started it, but the Bureau of Reclamation finished the job.
Today the world’s farmers are feeding twice as many people as in 1950 and are doing so with virtually the same amount of cultivated land – 5.8 million square miles, a plot almost the size of South America. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute estimates that without the high-yield agriculture developed since the 1950s, another 10 million square miles of land – an amount equal to the land mass of North America – would have to be in cultivation to feed the world. America’s agricultural 2 percent feeds the other 98 percent of us (for a remarkably small fraction of our incomes) and some of the rest of the world.
And what thanks do America’s farmers get for all the good they have done and are doing? Don’t get Roberts started. He says farmers have to survive locust-like swarms of environmental bureaucrats who try to seize the farmers’ property by designating as protected wetlands “some low spot in your field where no self-respecting duck would ever land.” And farmers are punished by a capital gains tax that ruins their retirement when they try to sell their farms to their sons or daughters. Roberts has had it up to here with people who would, if they could, “condemn all farmers for living in subsidized sin and would have farmers wear a scarlet “S’ on their overalls.”
But Roberts is not unforgiving. In fact, he wants it known he is so latitudinarian that he has even hired a staffer who went to school in Missouri, for Pete’s sake. Ever since Aug. 21, 1863, when Quantrill’s Raiders rode in from Missouri and sacked Lawrence, Kans., relations between the two states have been strained. Today the Chairman, with a magnanimity that becomes the mighty, offers clemency all around, even to people whose understanding of deficiency payments and other arcana of agriculture policy is deficient. Still, let’s be extra nice to Kansas. It has Roberts and Bob Dole and the new Secretary of Agriculture, former Congressman Dan Glickman. Kansas is at the wheel of the world and if we make it cross it can send us all to bed without dessert.
