CHANGE FOR FARMS

After decades of welfare farm policies, the Senate last week voted to break the link between farm prices and government subsidies.

If nothing else, a complete overhaul of this nation's farm policy is consistent with other efforts to diminish government's power and control over the marketplace. If the Republican-controlled Congress is going to make cuts in the growth of spending for education, Medicare, Medicaid and other government entitlements, it also must be willing to cut welfare to farmers.

The measure passed by the Senate Tuesday gives farmers a series of fixed but declining payments. The hope is that eventually we can end farm subsidies altogether. In exchange for less government support, controls over most planting decisions would end. Also ceasing would be requirements that some acres lay idle as a condition of farm payments.

The Senate bill would allow farmers -- after decades of government carrot-and-stick policies -- to plant what they want, where they want and when they want.

In other words, farmers finally will be able to plant for the marketplace and not for government. While farmers on the front end might disparage the decline in government payments, in the long run, they ought to prosper as they make intelligent market-based decisions.

One of the components of the Senate bill is a guarantee that a New Deal farm law stays on the books. That law calls for an outdated and expensive mix of high subsidies and production limits, which would kick in if farm laws aren't updated.

That means Republican plans to overhaul the nation's federal farm program are merely a seven-year experiment. Whether the experiment is successful or not, you can rest assured the issue will meet with heated debate in seven years.

That assumes of course the House will approve its own version of the farm bill, and that President Clinton will sign off on the compromise of the two versions.

The House, which will take up the issue late this month, is expected to eliminate nutrition, trade and other Senate provisions before the two houses will work out their difference in a final package for the president.

That compromise can take many forms. But it should make strides in reducing -- with an eye toward eliminating for good -- farm subsidies and price supports that for too long have resulted in government control over the supply-and-demand world of farming. By now, experience has shown government an inferior arranger of economic forces best left to the marketplace.