Word: farmerly
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Agricultural policy is not sexy. You probably don't know the intricacies of "loan deficiency payments" or "base acreage," and you probably don't care. This was once an agrarian nation, but now there's a less than 1% chance that you're a farmer, and if you are, you're probably part time; the average farm family gets 82% of its income from nonfarm sources. We're not a people of the soil anymore, and for most of us, our eyes glaze over when we see farm statistics like the ones in that last sentence...
...when a wave of foreclosures inspired those iconic Farm Aid concerts, the media's sporadic reports from farm country have tended to focus on floods, droughts and other disasters. But the farm crisis is as over as Barbara Mandrell. Farm incomes are at an all-time high. The median farmer enjoys five times the net worth of the median nonfarmer household. Crop prices have soared--thanks largely to the Federal Government's promotion of corn ethanol over more efficient renewable energies--and yet subsidies have as well...
...CULT OF THE SMALL FAMILY FARMER dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who hailed humble "cultivators of the earth" as America's "most valuable" and "most virtuous" citizens. Politicians 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...
...JEFFERSON'S DAY, 9 OUT OF 10 Americans cultivated the earth. When Abraham Lincoln created the U.S. Department of Agriculture, half the country still farmed. He once said farmers were "neither better nor worse than any other people," just "more numerous." (They also received inordinate political flattery, "the reason of which I cannot perceive, unless it be that they can cast more votes.") Under F.D.R., 1 in 5 Americans was still a farmer...
...happens to catch Scottie Pippen, Chevron, Ted Turner and 1,324 recipients in bucolic New York City, that's a small price to pay. "The system isn't perfect, but politics is the art of the possible, and the system works," says agribusiness lobbyist Charlie Stenholm, a cotton farmer and former Texas Congressman who was once the committee's top Democrat...