Will Visit Reap Results? Despite Clinton Visit, Farmers Say ‘Congress Calling The Shots’

Luther Auer has become a local magnet for visiting presidents.

He fielded handshakes from Ronald Reagan and George Bush, then Bill Clinton as he passed through the Yellowstone Valley farm country 20 miles north of here on Thursday.

“That’s pretty good in a lifetime,” said Auer, 86, whose son, Les, sponsored a lunchtime discussion of farm issues during Clinton’s Big Sky tour.

But the afterglow of Clinton’s visit wore off quickly for most Montana farmers.

Before they even smelled their morning coffee, farmers were nursing no illusions that the president’s visit will add up to much more than a few hundred handshakes when farm programs are reconstructed this summer.

In the harsh budget-cutting ethos of Washington, D.C., Clinton stands little chance of fighting off billions of dollars in proposed cuts to programs that boost farm incomes, nurture grain exports and encourage idling land for conservation.

“I don’t think he’s in the driver’s seat, frankly,” said Bud Leuthold, a wheat farmer and owner of the burgeoning Cream of the West hot cereal company. “Nice guy, but I think it’s Congress that’s calling the shots and Congress has said, ‘We’re going to balance the budget, cut the thing.”’

Clinton’s visit was viewed as largely political, a chance to mount an Arabian gelding, don a grain grower’s cap and otherwise polish his folksy, aw-shucks image. His approval rating has slid in Montana, which he carried in 1992, and contempt for his interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, is widespread after threatening grazing fee hikes and returning wolves.

When it comes to farm policy, however, the presidential ear is rarely the one to bend, said Leuthold. He saw as much when visiting Reagan as president of the National Association of Wheat Growers in the 1980s.

Not that farmers here are begging to keep the full complement of subsidies expected to cost $10 billion this year. In a libertarian urge that sets them off from many of their brethren in Eastern Washington and North Idaho, they have a strong desire to get the government out of farming.

Like the farmers surveyed recently by The Spokesman-Review, farmers here say they want the government to let up on regulations, avoid tampering with foreign markets and fight agriculture subsidies that give other nations an unfair competitive advantage.

Clinton should know as much already, said Ed Nessan, whose family farms 25,000 acres in Hardin, 85 miles to the north.

“If this is the first time he’s heard about it, we’re really in trouble, aren’t we?” Nessan said as farmers and ranchers drifted through the PAYS Cafe by the local stockyards.

Subsidized grain growers stand to see cuts of as much as $9 billion over the next five years. Clinton is proposing only $1.5 billion in cuts, but seemed resigned to deeper cuts and encouraged farmers to start listing their funding priorities.

Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, a Republican, showed how such priorities aren’t necessarily a partisan issue. Like Clinton, he wants to maintain funding for agricultural research and the Conservation Reserve Program, which has paid Montana farmers to set aside nearly 3 million erodible acres.

Also like Clinton, Burns said farmers have taken their fair share of cuts already, receiving less than half of what they did a decade ago.

“If others took the same cuts agriculture has taken in the past eight years, we wouldn’t have this deficit,” Burns said Friday.

Jim Johnson, an agricultural economist at Montana State University in Bozeman, has projected the income loss to a 4,000-acre farm if price supports drop 3 percent a year - which would save taxpayers $11.75 billion over five years.

That would mean an 18 percent drop in the farm’s net return on variable costs like seed, fertilizer and fuel. But that’s before considering factors like land costs, machinery, taxes and insurance, making it hard to predict how badly farmers here would suffer.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo