Welfare Queen: Farm subsidies for the filthy rich

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.reason.com/news/show/32308.html

July 2005

On March 23 The Guardian published what had until then been a government secret: which Brits rake in the biggest subsidies from the profligate European Union. Near the top of the list was the queen herself, whose farm in Norfolk received �769,000 (approximately $1.3 million) in 2003�04.

"The Queen is a landowner and a farmer," a royal spokesman told the paper. "She receives subsidy, just as any other farmer would do."

In the United States, it doesn't take a lengthy Freedom of Information Act request to turn up farm subsidy data. You just visit the Environmental Working Group's online database at ewg.org:16080/farm, where you can search largesse by state, county, city, and name.

What can you find there? That a certain R.E. Turner, known to the rest of the world as Ted, received $491,179 in subsidies from 1995 to 2003, broken down into $352,263 for conservation and $138,916 for commodities (wheat, barley, oats), mostly on his huge ranch in Bozeman, Montana. What's more, Turner Enterprises received an additional $206,948 in commodity subsidies for three other properties in the state, bringing the CNN founder's take from Uncle Sam to a minimum of $698,127.

More intriguing are the namesakes--and likely family members--of singer John Mellencamp, who co-founded the annual Farm Aid benefit concert 20 years ago because (as he recently told The Washington Post) the government was "running the small family farm...out of business." There are 34 Mellencamps in the Environmental Working Group's database, 12 of whom come from a single 20,000-resident town, Seymour, Indiana, which happens to be John Mellencamp's birthplace.

[anonymous171]

1. We should let the free market decide how much food to produce.

Worked so well in the late 20s early 30s after all.

[Cleita]

2. One of my college room mates was very well off and her family had

a huge spread in Eastern Kansas where they raised cattle and grew wheat. She explained how all that worked to me. Somehow, I'm not against it for the family farmer, even Ted Turner, but I am against it for any of the factory farm corporations like Monsanto.

[murielm99]

3. I agree.

There are plenty of small farms around where I live. They are family farms. They could not stay in existence without the subsidies.

Some family farmers have to have huge spreads, like the one in Kansas you mention, in order stay in business. We have forty acres tillable in a county south of us and ninety in Iowa. It is not our main source of income, nor could it ever be. Some years the subsidies keep us from going heavily into debt.

I live in a pork producing county. We have a few large hog farms here. I have lived here a long time, so I know the people involved. Both came into existence because they knew how to manipulate the local government. I know they pollute and find ways to get around the laws. One of them belongs to a family who is deeply involved in the republican government and politics that dominate this county. Taking them on is impossible.

OTOH, we have niche farmers here. There is at least one organic farm that raises cattle and hogs. They are genuinely organic. They have so many orders for their meat that they cannot take on any more business.

[MadHound]

4. Granted, these sorts of subsidies have become havens for corruption,

But the fact of the matter is that for thousands of small farmers, and countless thousands of acres of land, it is a boon.

Let me tell you my story. When my father passed ten years ago, the deed to the estate stated that my sister and I had to make certain payments for my step mother, including a monthly stipend and her long term care insurance. The money in the estate was sufficient to invest and make the monthly stipend payment, but we couldn't cover the long term care insurance bill, nor the taxes. We had one asset left to turn to before that money(which neither of us could afford) started coming out of our pockets, and that was the hundred acre family farm.

We rented the farm out for cattle grazing purposes, and while this did cover the bills, it was really deteriorating a piece of land that needed to go fallow for a number of years(it isn't that great a piece of land anyway, and had been overfarmed for decades). We put the land in the CRP program, a program that pays for us to grow native trees and grasses for the next fifteen years. This money covers the bills, allows the land to recover, and as the trees grow, acts as a carbon sink, which in this day and age of climate change is something we need all we can get.

So yes, we're getting paid a few thousand dollars a year to not try and farm a worked out piece of farmland. This money helps us keep an old lady in her home and provide security for her future, while helping out the environment. Is that such a bad thing?

The fact of the matter is that this is a scene repeated time and again across the country by thousands of small farmers. There are countless acres of tapped out farmland in the Midwest, and they need to go fallow for a generation or so. This is due to the Green Revolution post WWII when we dramatically up our use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This allowed for extraordinary amounts of crops to be raised, but the price extracted from the soil was horrendous. Tens of thousands of acres have been tapped out, and the only other alternative to paying to take them out of production is to continue the chemical cycle that got us into this mess, and eventually turn the entire breadbasket of our country into a desert.

Are there abuses to this program, sure, just as there are abuses with any other government program. But rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we need to concentrate on punishing the few bad actors, but also keep the land that needs to recover in programs that allow that recovery. Otherwise, within a generation, two at most, we won't be able to grow our own food.