"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it's liberty and interests by the most lasting bands." -- (Thomas Jefferson, 1785)
Thank Thomas Jefferson for the nearly $17 billion we taxpayers are forced to shell out every year to subsidize two dozen commodities with price supports, as well as billions more for a complex of interrelated agricultural benefits for everything from crop insurance to irrigation payments.
It was the Sage of Monticello, gentleman farmer, tinkerer, and agricultural scientist, who envisioned an America of "yeoman farmers," whose industriousness, virtue, devotion to the land, and love of freedom would one day extend coast to coast in an "Empire of Liberty."
Jefferson offered this vision as a counterweight to Alexander Hamilton's money grubbing commercial ideas of factory owners and shopkeepers running the country (along with stock jobbers and speculators). The two great visions of America have clashed since our founding, with Hamilton's ideals eventually winning out.
But the romanticized Jeffersonian vision of the small farmer, battling Mother Nature and the land itself, has never quite died the death it should have. Hence, beginning with the New Deal, farmers have been given special treatment by the government in the form of price supports that place a floor underneath commodity prices. And most of that taxpayer cash goes to "farmers" who are quite far from Jefferson's yeoman farmer vision. In fact, it was discovered in 2007 that about $1.3 billion in farm aid went to people who didn't grow or produce any agricultural products at all, while another study in 2008 found that two thirds of the subsidies go to just 10% of all farmers.
The farm bill last year finally began to address this problem, although it was done in rather timid fashion. From here on out, if you're a farmer and you make more than $500,000 a year, your subsidy goes down 10% for every hundred thousand in income.
But forget about the spectacle of millionaire farmers reaching into our pockets. What about those few family farmers who are left after the shocks in the 1980's and 90's? Don't they deserve to survive?
It depends on how you define "family farm." The Agriculture Department defines "small" as a farm that has less than $50,00 in annual income, while other measurements can go up to $500,000 in sales (note the difference between "sales" and "income"). Some "family farms" are multi-million dollar businesses while others sit on no more than a couple of hundred acres.
The fact is, there are some small farmers who husband their resources, are good risk managers, and could probably make it just fine in a free market without subsidies while others would fail. The point being, current price supports actually reward risk-taking and bad farming practices.
For example, farmers, large and small, know about crop and field rotation, where some fertile land is allowed to lie fallow while soil nutrients are replenished and other fields will have different crops rotated so as not to totally deplete the land. Right now, the government pays farmers to do this with "conservation reservation" payments to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. The program is not based on any scientific need to replenish fields or rotate crops but rather simply to drive up the cost of commodities. With tens of millions of acres subscribed, some estimates are that a wise-use policy could cut the number of fallow acreage in half while not affecting farm income.
Indeed, it is farm income that is at the bottom of all this fiddling with the market. If subsidies and price supports were phased out, wouldn't that cause farmer's income to plummet? If done intelligently, the likely outcome would not affect farm income but would probably lower food costs. This would be possible because farmers would grow more of what consumers were demanding and less of what they weren't.
Case in point; milk. If you are looking for rational government policy about anything, do not examine our milk price support system. If you do, knowing quantum mechanics is probably helpful. In a nutshell, the farther the dairy farmer is from his customers, the higher the supporting price, but not all the time and there are many exceptions. There is no reason milk should be as expensive as it is except for government interference. Left to market imperatives, dairy farmers would make rational choices about how much to produce as well as where to sell it.
And let's not forget the role politics plays in all of this. The 2007 Farm Bill, which cost us $287 billion, had 43 percent of that funneled to Congressional districts that had a serving member of one of the Agriculture Committees. Coincidence? Or just plain pork barrel politics?
Now, I'm sure you're just as romantic as I am about America's past. The vision of a pastoral America is a powerful one, hearkening back to a simpler age where families stayed for generations on the land, making the farm work while battling dust, insects, and drought in order to feed themselves, and the nation.
But those days are gone. In 1933, there were 6,000,000 farms in America and nearly 70% of the country lived in rural areas. Today, there are less than 500,000 farms and 70% of our citizens live in cites and suburbs. Yes, we are paving over too much of our farmland- the most productive land in the history of the human race. And yes, it is getting harder and harder for smaller farms to make it.
But today, farm subsidies are costing us hundreds of billions in increased food costs, taxes, and lost exports as other countries put up ruinous tariffs to keep our below cost, subsidized products off their shelves. Ending these subsidies would be beneficial in the long run for consumers, for farmers, and for the world’s poor who would benefit enormously from lower food prices.
After all, did we subsidize mom and pop grocery stores when supermarkets threatened their existence? What about blacksmiths or wheelwrights? Did we try and save those lost American icons of the frontier? And surely we did nothing to save the carriage industry when automobiles replaced them.
Time marches on and what was once beloved and desired loses its relevancy and practicality. It is long past time to phase out subsidizing farmers who don't need it, as well as those who should have sold out or gone out of business long ago. The nation survived when the blacksmith had to find another line of work or the carriage-making companies finally closed their doors.
And we will survive the loss of subsidized farming as well.
Rick Moran's Bio
Rick Moran is the Chicago editor of Pajamas Media, an associate editor of American Thinker and the proprietor of the blog Rightwing Nuthouse.
Posted
07-07-2009 12:05 AM
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