March 17, 1986

As the Senate Finance Committee prepared to begin drafting a sweeping tax-revision plan, a top White House official said today that some changes would ultimately have to be made to the working blueprint for President Reagan to endorse it. In unveiling his draft proposal last week, Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, the Republican chairman of the committee, said his plan had the backing of Mr. Reagan. But when asked today whether the President would sign the Packwood plan as is, Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, replied, ''Not as it stands now.'' The Packwood proposal is to be used as a starting point for the committee when it begins drafting a bill on Wednesday. ''There are some things in it that we will want to have changed,'' Mr. Regan said, ''but we think it's a good, working document.'' It was unclear whether those changes would prove a stumbling block to the committee's deliberations since Mr. Regan did not identify what changes he had in mind.

President Reagan, condemning Nicaragua as a ''cancer'' that poses a direct threat to the United States, said tonight that stopping Communism and international terrorism there would serve as a historic test of his Presidency. In a bluntly worded television speech that lasted about 20 minutes, Mr. Reagan called on the American people to demand that Congress endorse the Administration's $100 million aid package for the Nicaraguan rebels. The alternative, he said, was to face a growing Soviet beachhead in Central and South America, increased terrorism in the region and a tide of ''desperate Latin peoples by the millions'' fleeing into the southern United States. ''For our own security, the United States must deny the Soviet Union a beachhead in North America,'' he said.

A Miami dispatch yesterday about Frank A. Sturgis, a Watergate burglar who says he will try to reopen his case, described Federal District Judge John J. Sirica incorrectly. He is alive.

The wave of farm failures that has swept the country is swamping public and private lenders and stimulating the rapid growth of professional farm management. Since 1981, when the agriculture depression began, the number of farms overseen by the nation's 1,000 farm management companies has increased by more than 40 percent, to 110,000 from 78,000, according to AgriFinance magazine, an influential trade journal. The number of acres these companies manage has grown from 48 million to nearly 59 million, an area roughly the size of Colorado. Historically, such management companies, composed of production specialists and marketing analysts, operated farms primarily for retired couples who did not want to sell their land and for those who inherited farms but did not want to manage them. But public and private lenders, through acquisitions and foreclosures, and investors who saw a good opportunity for profit and tax savings, now own thousands of failed family farms. They have turned to management companies to operate or sell the farms.

The greatest numbers of schizophrenics do not now live in hospitals or in the streets or jails, but rather with their families, representing a profound change in the way the nation cares for its most severely mentally ill. The families, many health officials have only recently concluded, are forgotten victims of this baffling disorder that disables one of every hundred Americans at some point in their lives. Parents and siblings of schizophrenics say they are racked by demands that would overtax a Mother Theresa. They describe themselves as bitter, despairing and wrung out. Families Become the Doctors Between the excruciating turbulence at home and the limited services they receive from public agencies, families become ''lost in a process that is hideously engulfing,'' as one woman with a schizophrenic niece described it.