Naturally Interesting

Sam Hurst writes Betting the Farm in Gourmet on the Farm Bill and its effect on farmers. Good read, but long. Here are some highlights:

• The farm bill run more than 1,000 pages of dense, convoluted language. It is traditionally hammered out by an alliance of farm-state politicians and agribusiness groups.  It has been described as “a patchwork of parochial programs lacking a vision.”
• In 1920in Walworth County, there were 653 farms. In 2008, there are 322.
• In the land of industrial agriculture, where people are quick to tell you that heavy machinery, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and the federal safety net make farming possible, Matthew’s family has gone back to an old-fashioned, diversified, organic family farm.
• In good times, grain production should expand, in bad times contract. But with farm subsidies, instead of buffering, we have created permanent overproduction, and disaster payments just encourage production on marginal lands.
• What is lost in the caps debate, is the opportunity to shift the entire paradigm of federal farm policy from subsidies and price supports to conservation, stewardship, and support for innovators.
• Under current federal policy, farmers receive “direct payments” each year, no matter what crops they grow or how they grow them. A multifunctional approach would build on and rechannel those payments, along with other crop-support subsidies, toward sustainable social and conservation goals. “Pay farmers to reduce synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Pay them to diversify their crops, build soil, and restore wetlands. Pay them to develop local mar­kets for their products, especially fresh food.”
• If farmers want to plow native prairie, they should not be in the program. If they want to grow single-crop monocultures without rotation and play the commodity market, that’s their right, but the government should not pay for it. If they pollute, charge them to clean it up. Don’t use public money to pay large hog-confinement operations to build expensive waste ponds. That should be part of the cost of doing business.”

The farm bill - doing whats wrong. Because its gets us re-elected and makes us a lot of money.