The Farm Dole

2002-09-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

CAN'T GET ENOUGH of the Tom-Harkin-campaign-taping-weird-bizarrofest? Click here and wallow in it like Scrooge McDuck in a pile of taxpayers' money. Unfortunately, Harkin's Republican opponent is (no surprise) equally beholden to the farm-welfare lobby. Sigh.

2002-08-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. This is a random round-up of anti-farm subsidy articles and papers. I do this not because I think you people are too stupid to do this, but in order to demonstrate how wide-ranging opposition to the farm dole is.

AllAfrica.com
A Canadian finance minister
The Guardian
A(nother) lefty news site
A righty think tank
A libertarian think tank
A lefty NYT op-ed writer
A random Kenyan vegetable saleswoman, via TIME Europe
Business Week

All for now. More farm stuff presently...

2002-08-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

FARMERS AGAINST SUBSIDIES: Not American farmers, of course. After all, American farmers are emblems of independence and local, communal aid--we've gotta make sure they stay on welfare! Now, if only them furriners had a real appreciation for good old fashioned free enterprise...

2002-08-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

ETHANOL: NOW MORE THAN EVER. Ethanol subsidy update from intrepid foe of farm-welfare Michelle Malkin. Lots of good stuff. Here's a small sample: "According to the Washington Post, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) supervised the writing of a section in the Senate-passed energy bill requiring gasoline refiners to nearly triple the use of ethanol by 2012.

"After 2012, this anti-free market maneuver would guarantee ethanol a growing fixed share of the country's fuel consumption every year, no matter what consumers actually demand or what better methods of reformulating gasoline come along."

Note: That link goes to Malkin's current column. After she posts a new one, you can find the ethanol update here--look around August 28.

2002-08-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

MCCAIN ROCKS!!!: OK, well, he did rock on one issue, back in 1999, but hey, I'll take what I can get. A good Michelle Malkin column on why ethanol subsidies are lamer than lame. Only one GOP candidate was willing to say so at an Iowa primary debate. Guess who it was? (Hint: Not Dubya.)

2002-07-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

LINKS LINKS LINKS: J. Bradford Delong on cotton subsidies and African workers.

Dave Barry on mohair and other farm subsidies. Great stuff.

And I battle Wendell Berry. Start here, then scroll down.

2002-05-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

I know I've been neglecting this site. Will try to post farm-dole-y goodness fairly soon.

2002-04-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

THE PIGS AND THE ASS: Dumb talk from a Kennedylet.

2002-02-12T15:52:00.000-08:00

...SO?: A friend sent me this Michelle Malkin smackdown of the Environmental Working Group, which I've praised for its farm-dole expose project. The nifty thing, though, is that it doesn't matter if Malkin's points are correct--the EWG has been getting props for its reporting, not its accounting, lobbying, or silly scare campaigns. As far as I know, no one's questioned the farm subsidy numbers. Anyway, just figured I had to note that, in case you hear that EWG has been "debunked" and therefore its farm-dole research is irrelevant. I really can't stand it when people just casually say, "Well, Jones has been debunked," or, "Smith debunked Brown over a year ago," with no attention to what that means and whether the relevant portions of Jones' or Smith's work has actually been addressed.

2002-02-11T13:51:00.000-08:00

HOME ECONOMICS: I'm about five pages from the end of Wendell Berry's essay collection Home Economics. I'm still puzzling over some of it, and I doubt I agree with most of what he's saying, but I'll lay two things on your plate right now: an inspiring essay and a dumb solution.

Dumb solution first, because I screwed up the blog-mechanism. Throughout the book, Berry refers to the depredations suffered by farmers at the hands of the "free market"--always in quotes. He gives one paragraph alone to the problems caused by farm subsidies, and even then does not move beyond the true, but insufficient, point that these subsidies have benefited agribusiness at the expense of small farmers.

How Berry sees anything resembling a free market when he looks at farm prices is beyond me, and I suspect this belief that today's American farm operates in some kind of laissez-faire Samiztopia leads him to be much more sympathetic to subsidies and government regulation of farming than he should be. Berry even says, "It may be that the greatest danger to farmers is their inclination to look to the government for help, after the agribusiness corporations and the universities (to which they have already looked) have failed them. In the process, they have forgotten how to look to themselves, to their farms, to their families, to their neighbors, and to their tradition."

But among his other proposed solutions to the steep decline in family farming, Berry proposes a better subsidy. If only I ran the subsidies! you can hear him sigh. Well OK, what's his plan?

"[T]he price of farm products, as they leave the farm, should be on a par with the price of those products that the farmer must buy. ...[W]e must control agricultural production; supply must be adjusted to demand. Obviously this is something that individual farmers, or individual states, cannot do for themselves; it is a job that belongs appropriately to the federal government. ...We have... the right to be small farmers or small businessmen or -women..."

This proposal would require price controls on vast swathes of the economy--especially if we take his inclusion of "small businessmen" seriously: What doesn't some small businessman, somewhere, need to buy? Who will decide whose farms and businesses are too big? How will we make those decisions without evoking the very envy, entitlement mentality, and sense of dependence on the government that Berry abhors? Why should the feds step in to keep farmers farming (which is what they're trying to do anyway, with predictable efficiency), but not to keep doctors doctoring, teachers teaching, tractor-factory workers manufacturing tractors, or my great-grandfather running his first lousy business (oh wait--Berry does want that, since my illustrious forebear was a small businessman, however deadly he might have been to each business he touched)?

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Berry's hostility to the free market has made him cuddle up to the feds. But I don't believe federal subsidies can be made farmer-friendly, and I don't believe that farmers should want what would be, essentially, welfare that worked--a sinecure.

2002-02-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

FARMING THAT MAKES SENSE. The inspiring essay is "A Good Farmer of the Old School," in which Berry profiles Lancie Clippinger, a farmer who managed to prosper while his neighbors were going under. Lancie did it by reducing his costs, rather than by increasing his production. Some quotes make the point better than I can: "[W]hat struck me most... was the way he had employed nature and the hogs themselves to his own advantage. ...[I]nstead of harvesting his corn mechanically, hauling it, storing it, grinding it, and hauling it to his shoats, he let the shoats harvest and grind it for themselves." Lancie switched from horses to tractors when his neighbors did, but, unlike them, he switched back: "Part of the justification for the return to the use of horses is economic. When he was doing all his work with tractors, Lancie's fuel bill was $6,000 a year; now it is about $2,000. Since the horses themselves are a profit-making enterprise on this farm, the $4,000 they save on fuel is money in the bank. But the economic reason is not the only one: 'Pleasure,' Lancie says, 'is a big part of it.'" He uses manure from his cattle and horses rather than buying fertilizer--another cost savings. "If you are losing money on the corn you produce, he points out, the more you produce the more you lose."

And Lancie's farm is flexible: "A farmer who has no fences cannot turn hogs in to harvest his corn when prices are low. A farmer who has invested heavily in a farrowing house and all the equipment that goes with it is stuck with that investment. If, for some reason, it ceases to be profitable for him to produce feeder pigs, he still has the farrowing house, which is good for little else, and perhaps a debt on it as well." Lancie, by contrast, can quickly pick up or drop different crops and livestock, "because he has invested in no expensive, specialized equipment."

Berry uses Lancie's example to argue against the "industrial" mindset or model. I don't share his opposition to the modern economy, but the industrial mindset is real, and damaging--it might surprise Berry to learn that Virginia Postrel has also taken up her pen against the notion that the best economic management is top-down, inflexible, vast, and unresponsive to local needs. Postrel's solutions differ greatly from Berry's, unsurprisingly, and so far I (mostly) prefer hers. Nonetheless, "A Good Farmer of the Old School" proposes a common-sense way for farmers to make a good living, rather than scraping along on subsidies and rust.

I'd greatly welcome comments from anyone with experience with this kind of farming, since I hope I've made it clear that I've never farmed and never plan to. (I started this site because my relative's command, "Write about farm prices!", has bothered me ever since she said it. I don't claim expertise of the learned or the lived varieties.) I can be reached at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com.

2002-02-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

DON'T NURTURE MY PIG: Good solid NRO piece.

2002-02-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

BUSH AND DOLE: Hey look! Robert Samuelson is slamming the porkalicious budget! However, this generally fine article makes a couple blunders. (I can't believe I'm writing that about a real economist.) First, Samuelson pooh-poohs the notion that the farm dole props up Big Agribusiness, arguing that technology, not subsidies, tanked the family farm. Maybe; who knows what would have happened without the subsidies? But subsidy payoffs inarguably helped big farmers buy out little ones. This is just not in dispute, as far as I know. So even if the family farm would have vanished without the dole, some of the blame for its rapid decline must go to the subsidizers.

Rich Lowry, over on The Blog That Dare Not Speak Its Name, made the other point better than I could: "The indispensable Robert Samuelson points out that there's a corruption behind programs like farm subsidies, that do nothing to promote the public interest but do help politicians get elected: 'Farm subsidies are huge political bribes. Though they are perfectly legal, the ethics are questionable. The trouble is that hardly anyone raises the questions. The silence defines Washington's self-serving and hypocritical "morality."' Why is the “scandal” that certain businessmen give politicians their money? Shouldn't it be much worse when politicians, for utterly self-serving and venal reasons, give favored constituents our money?"

2002-02-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

TWO MORE: A very basic anti-farm-welfare piece from Michael Lynch of Reason; good intro. And more Blake Hurst, this time an enviro-regulation horror story.

2002-02-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

TWO LINKS: Stick your snouts in these troughs of fine info. Blake Hurst's "The Great Exception" describes the failure of Freedom to Farm and the harsh effects of trade restrictions on U.S. farmers. Gerard Bourgeois' "Escaping a Dairyman's Dilemma" explains how the dairy cartel milks consumers and bilks farmers; he also proposes a solution. I'll post more links if people send 'em. eve_tushnet@yahoo.com.

2002-02-01T14:01:00.000-08:00

1/8/02: Re-reading the 1/2/02 post that started this whole farm-dole kick, I realized that it may be confusing. I say that farm subsidies reward overproduction, thus leading to a drop in prices. But doesn't everybody know that farm subsidies are those things where the government pays farmers not to farm?

As explained by P.J. O'Rourke in his excellent book Parliament of Whores, that's true too. (See "Agricultural Policy: How to Tell Your Ass from This Particular Hole in the Ground.") US farm policy is a shandeh, a mishegoss, and the product of a meshuginer, and almost anything you could say about it is true unless you say it helps farmers.

The farm dole exists to keep farmers farming, no matter what. Hence the "immense dog's breakfast of programs, laws and regulations" O'Rourke describes: "You see, if the weather's bad and we have lots of droughts and freezes, we'll have to give disaster aid and crop-insurance payments to farmers, and the farm bill will end up costing us more. On the other hand, if the weather's good and we have plentiful harvests, we'll have to buy up surplus commodities and pay farmers to cut down on planting, and the farm bill will end up costing us more yet. ...This conflict between policies that send prices up and policies that drive prices down results in the need for a third category of policies that do nothing at all. These are the famous programs that give farmers money for not farming."

But the basic idea is always: keep farmers from having to switch jobs. Everybody wants to keep the noble, independent small-farmer milking his cows and shucking his corn. But first of all, farm policy typically grants its welfare payments based on how much acreage you farm, so it essentially subsidizes big agribusiness concerns that buy up little farms. And more importantly, Farmer Bob has already lost the noble, independent qualities we value if he can only maintain his farm by going on the dole. (Here, have a pertinent "Bloom County" cartoon.)

Farm policy exists to remove market incentives and pressures. But you can't do that, no matter how much you try. The end result of this--despite conflicting policies--is, as far as I can tell, overproduction. Too many people are growing too much food. So prices fall. So lots of farmers leave. But many can continue to farm only because of subsidies, so they hang in there--often valiantly, if wrongly--and keep producing, and prices keep falling. Technological improvements worsen the problem by squeezing more crop out of less land. So farm prices end up higher than they would be without subsidies, but low enough that many farmers have to take second jobs. Great going, Uncle Sam.

My great-grandfather was a serial entrepreneur. He'd start a business. It would fail. He'd start another. It would fail. And so on until he'd owned half the storefronts in Maplewood, NJ--one at a time. If the government had applied its farm policy to his businesses, though, he'd still be plugging away at Failure #1, barely scraping by, probably pinning his hopes on more cash from the Feds rather than on the next business idea.

A final question, of course, is: What's wrong with high farm prices? Farmers are good people, so why shouldn't they make money? Well, let's keep in mind that farmers produce food. You know, food--that thing that when you don't get it, you starve. High farm prices mean that an inner-city mom feeds her kids welfare cheese instead of ham, and I don't know why that's supposed to be a good thing. (Jonah Goldberg makes the same point about milk subsidies.)

Okay, I await corrections and clarifications from people who know more about this stuff than I do.

2002-02-01T13:58:00.000-08:00

1/5/02: INFORMATION AND FARMERS BOTH WANT TO BE FREE: Tom Daschle is trying to prevent the release of information about who receives farm subsidies. Daschle manages to be anti-journalist, anti-environmentalist (a green group performed the recent, splashy anti-subsidy expose), and anti-farmer too. He's on a roll.

2002-02-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

1/2/02: BOUGHT THE FARM*: Farm subsidies are hideous, soul-sucking things. A 12/27 New York Times article (of all things) reported that many farmers are starting to get the message, thanks to the site www.ewg.org, which publishes a list of all subsidy recipients and how much they got. (The article costs money, so I'm not linking it.) Current farm policy subsidizes overproduction--and then the bureaucrats are startled when prices fall. Hey, whaddya know, a glut on the market hurts prices! When farmers suffer from the plummeting prices, the state steps in to cushion the fall. That welfare payout saps any incentive to switch to a new product, and it traps farmers in the same cycle of crop boom and price bust. The Times hammers on the even slimier fact that big agribusinesses profit from the subsidies, while small farms get slammed--but the NYT, typically, fails to realize that prices will drop even if only small farmers are subsidized. Those who romanticize the family farmer should note that today, he is entirely dependent on government aid. To quote banker Donald J. Schiff, from the NYT article, "Now the public knows what we bankers have known for a long time: that farmers have lost their freedom." And to quote Machiavelli, "A shrewd ruler, therefore, must try to ensure that his citizens, whatever the situation may be, will always be dependent on the government and on him; and then they will always be loyal to him." Hail Prince Harkin!
*The date and time don't match because this post was transferred from GeoCities.

2002-02-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I went to a family wedding in Ames, IA. Half of my family is Hawkeye, and they all wanted to know what I planned to do after college. When I said, "journalism," one white-haired relative (I think she was an aunt of some variety) fixed me with a ferocious gaze and said intensely, "Write about farm prices!"

So I will. This page will be a running update on farm subsidy news and views. Please send personal stories, news clips, rants, questions, and even reasoned criticism to eve_tushnet@yahoo.com.