8 Comments:

govt, entertainment, etc in our country needs a complete overhaul. add the USDA farm system to the list.

By  Vinneeee, at 9:41 AM  

Farm subsidies are good god-given rights for real Americans. If we could get rid of all the waste that goes to that damn UN and those damn poor black people, we could subsidize even more of these patriotic rights for the people who really deserve them like farmers and oil companies and people with big estates to protect.

By  Anonymous, at 10:23 AM  

The only thing worse than the current farm subsidy system would be suddenly eliminating it. We need to transition from a lousy system to something marginally less bad.

By  Hammer, at 10:44 AM  

First of all I don't think Jefferson should bear too much of the brunt of criticism on this one. Yes, he was a big fan of the yeoman farmer, but he was off in France when the constitution was being written so the Senate system is more the doing of Madison than TJ, but it was the price of getting small states like CT, NH, NJ and RI to join the union. And most all of the states were agricultural ones in those days.

CL, can yo really get crop price supports for things you don't grow? I know there are land conservation programs that pay you to keep land idle for environmental reasons, which seems fair to me. My parents have a half section of land in Eastern SD and I thought the price supports were based on how much you grew. In fact I'm not sure how it would work otherwise. How do they determine how much you would have grown? If you grow nothing how do they decide which crop they are "supporting" you for? "Last year I didn't grow wheat but this year I'm not growing oats because the payments are higher." I don't disagree that there are some bad economics, and some really f'd up policy, involved but that doesn't seem possible to me.

And of course as a good liberal I can think of lots of other problems with farm policy, like what subsidies to US farmers do to farmers in poor countries trying to grow crops for export, or the environmental damage done by trying to have sugar industry in places like Florida instead of just importing it from Central or South America. And with Cuba in the news the last few days I'm reminded that some portion of our screwed up policy towards that nation is the fear of what lifting the embargo would do to American sugar farmers.

By  Jambo, at 11:09 AM  

CL -- I was about to blast you on iPods, which couldn't work without the Internet, which the government largely created. Then you went and acknowledged it, so I'm stuck apologizing to you for the thing I was going to say. My bad.

Jambo: I'm not an expert on the farm subsidy system, but I do believe it's based on acreage. The subsidy is given for growing fewer crops or not growing crops at all. It's based on the expected yield for the acreage. Farming is pretty scientific these days. My uncle's farm can give you the daily milk reports for each cow. The impressive part of that, though, is how the computer system is tied directly to the milking parlor so that all the data is automatically recorded. And, of course, GPS is now used to track how field production down to the square yard. (Or could be, I'm supposing. I don't know how precise the information needs to be to be useful.)

I also know that ponies are not useful farm animals.

By  Hammer, at 11:24 AM  

Do they just base payments on whatever the last crop planted was? Could you plant something different for a year to change to a different payment? I'm reminded of the old joke about the guy ran all the way to town behind a bus thus saving the $1.50 bus fair. A friend then tells him he should have run behind a cab instead and saved $20.

I agree with you that it's insane. I think there are some legitimate issues about food security that are decent arguments to protect some level of domestic production and I like the thought of thousands of individual producers rather than a handful of giants jsut because it has more of the feel of a real free market, but there must be a better way to go about it.

By  Jambo, at 4:23 PM  

Going back to Hammer's original comment, and without the screed, there is a way for small farmers to integrate vertically. They have been doing it for years: Farmer cooperatives. Land O' Lakes, for example, is a vertically integrated farmer coop originally set up to help farmers market their milk. Sunkist is another for California oranges, etc. Problem is that the market drives down the prices for the commodities (one bottle of milk is just like every other bottle of milk) while the price of oil keeps going up. You need to be big to stay in farming. It used to be that Minnesota and Wisconsin were the dairy capitals of the world. But, milk pricing is determined by the producer's distance from EauClaire, Wisconsin. The further from EauClaire, the higher the price you get for milk. That's why there are so many mega dairys (ies??) in California, Texas, and Florida, and why there are so many fewer dairy farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Questions of food security aside, the market is working, and for all the bucolic aura of the "family farm," I'm not sure the market isn't a better mechanism. Unfortunately, the market is confused and interfered with by farm state politics. A Red River valley beet farmer with a gazillion acres under cultivation benefits from sugar subsidies, the embargoe of Cuba and a host of other benefits that total a lot of bad public policy, but a lot of good local political attention.

By  Anonymous, at 11:11 AM  

I agree with TRR that the current farm policy should be replaced with a market-solution, phased-in over time, with every effort made to help the small farms transition to profitable enterprises absent subsidies.

Cenex/Land o' Lakes (and grain elevators, generally) are partial examples of what I'm suggesting. Absent subsidies, could small farmers survive with greater cooperation? I don't know. But it seems to me that there's a lot of duplication of equipment on small farms. Is it impossible to share equipment because of planting and harvesting schedules?

By  Hammer, at 11:22 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home