Word: corns
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...tough. "What a joke," grumbles Congressman Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat who led a failed bipartisan reform effort in the House. "You're eligible as long as you're breathing." Actually, that's not quite true. Since the vast majority of the cash goes to five row crops--corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice--more than 60% of our farmers receive no subsidies. And a recent Government Accountability Office report identified $1.1 billion of subsidies whose recipients were no longer breathing...
...still paint American Gothic portraits of the country folk who toil in the soil to grow our food and fiber. But at the Husker Harvest Days farm show in September in Grand Island, Neb., it was clear how far American agriculture had come from the days when Cornhuskers husked corn by hand...
...farm show looked like a state fair but felt like an industry expo, with barkers urging visitors to increase productivity or cut costs rather than ride a pony or eat corn dogs. John Deere salesmen showed off their largest machinery ever, including a 530-horsepower tractor and a combine that costs $410,000 fully equipped. At the Firestone tent, a rep said the company is preparing a 91-in. (230 cm) farm tire, taller than Yao Ming. TopCon Precision Agriculture exhibited GPS gadgets that adjust your spraying and watering according to the topography of your fields and can even steer...
...hard to start big, which is why agriculture has the kind of demographics that cancels sitcoms: only 6% of farmers are younger than 35, while 26% are over 65. "It's damn near impossible to get started today," Craig Ebberson says during a tour of the endless rows of corn and soybeans he farms with his sons near Randolph, Neb. "Farms are getting bigger and more efficient, and that's not going to stop." The Environmental Working Group's farm-subsidy database shows that Ebbersons in the area collected $3 million in crop aid over the past decade. Craig used...
What's happened is, some farm families got big, but more got out. Subsidies have helped finance the expansion plans of the big guys while inflating the rents of the little guys. Ebberson's neighbor Mike Korth has a 1,000-acre (400 hectare) corn and soybean spread that would have been considered enormous a century ago but is now about average for the area. His township has only 39 families on 36 sq. mi. (94 sq km), a frontier-level population density. No wonder a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study found the rural counties most dependent...