With few exceptions, farmers across the country are celebrating their freedom of choice to plant what they want, wherever they want -- unencumbered by Agriculture Department controls for the first time since the Roosevelt administration.

The 1996 Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act -- or Freedom to Farm Act, as it is more widely known -- ended half a century of complex, rigid and arbitrary rules telling farmers how to use their land in exchange for subsidies.

• The federal government paid farmers an average of $5.5 billion a year in crop subsidies between 1990 and 1996.

• They will continue to get $30 billion in "transition payments" through 2002 -- but these are no longer linked to what is planted in the field.

• Responding, to favorable prices, good weather and high export expectations, farmers have planted their largest crops since the 1980s.

• Commodity prices hit historic highs last year and farm exports reached nearly $60 billion.

In 1973, American farm productivity was 34 percent higher than average farm productivity in the European Union. But by 1993 it was 42 percent higher -- reflecting, experts say, the less paternalistic government practices in the U.S.