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...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 that money to snap up more land, expand his feedlot, invest in a nearby ethanol plant and buy gizmos that track his fertilizer and pesticide use and the food and drug intake of every cow. It's no accident that agriculture's productivity...
...vagaries of the weather and the market. Farming is indeed a risky business--most businesses are risky businesses--and farm policies have tried to reduce that risk by any means available. The result has been an evolving mix of income supports, price supports, disaster relief, government purchases of surplus crops for school lunches or foreign aid, and "supply controls" that boost crop prices by preventing overproduction. Such controls range from rules requiring farmers to leave some land fallow to acreage allotments directing them as to what and how much to plant. "If you can't feed and clothe yourself, your...
...intellectual discussion about weaning farmers off the dole, but of course, it didn't happen." Instead, GOP leaders agreed the next farm bill would wean farmers off subsidies but only after they received seven years of guaranteed transitional payments--even when prices were high. Farmers also received more generous crop-insurance subsidies so that Congress would no longer need to send them disaster checks every time their region had nasty weather. But when prices collapsed again in 1998, Congress approved the most generous disaster packages in history...
...billion dollars a year have averaged $17 billion. They'll be lower this year because commodity prices are so high. But owners of eligible farmland will still get direct payments regardless of how much their farms earn or whether their farms are still farmed. And even though crop-insurance subsidies have increased nearly tenfold, farmers will still receive disaster aid if things go badly, no matter how often that happens. More than 21,000 farmers have cashed at least 11 disaster checks each in the past 21 years, at a cost of $2.5 billion...
...become the heroin. "I don't like direct payments myself, but they're political reality," Peterson says. "I needed them in there to keep everyone on board." In fact, the House bill increased the maximum direct payment 50%. And cutting easier-to-defend payments for times of low crop prices was even less realistic...