My grandfather is a farmer. Well, in the eyes of the government, he is a farmer. In exchange for turning his land over to the woods and not growing anything, he receives a regular check. And he's not the only one. Our current Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack was also paid to do nothing with his land. While an argument can and is made to support this practice (we need to encourage responsible use of the land, which sometimes involves allowing fields to go fallow to prevent nutrient depletion in the soil from constant farming), the rabbit hole that is farm subsidies in the United States often strays far from the public, or even the farmer's, interest. As Congress looks to trim the budget, some farmers are welcoming the cuts.
Cutting farm subsidies presents a huge political risk. Who wants to be the politician to take on the backbone of an agrarian nation? But Thomas Jefferson's agrarian nation has passed and though farmers still prove potent political propaganda, the farmers that benefit from subsidies are often far from Jefferson's ideal. In the early days of New England's colonization, families were given plots that included woodland, farmland, and townland. Measured with a system of "metes and bounds," the division of land insured a diversity of uses while allowing families to support themselves with subsistence farming. A nation of small farmers was not hard to imagine.
Fast forward past speculation, credit crises, and farm policies that homogenized crops and into the Urban Century, where a majority of the world lives in cities and nearly 75 percent of our farm subsidies go to only ten percent of farmers. The Times reported today that politicians and farmers like Craig Lang, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, are prepared to cut those subsidies with proposals like lowering the maximum yearly income ceiling to still receive federal funding from $750,000 to $250,000 or changing policies that now award so much money to landowners living in Chicago, Phoenix, or New York City. On their own website however, the Farm Bureau fails to include these proposals in their policies section, writing instead that they oppose any changes to Iowa's income and property taxes that may raise taxes, "including changes to the agriculture productivity formula and assessment of farm buildings."
It's inconsistencies like this that make me doubtful the overhaul of farm subsidies we need is imminent.
After brief stops in Ohio and Wisconsin, I have made my way from New York City to the Southeast corner of Minnesota. I spend my days looking and applying for jobs, trying to learn the banjo, and driving past rolling hills of soybean and corn. Unfortunately, all of these activities have involved some disappointment but I'll just speak to the last. Commodity prices are rising and judging from the late planting season and bouts of flooding and rain that haven been threatening crops, prices will only continue to rise. At the same time, small farmers don't seem to be getting the benefit. Joe Outlaw of Texas A&M University told the Times, "'One of the big reasons the payments are important is that it helps farmers get credit to continue operating, because the lenders know they are going to get their money back,' he said. 'You take the payments away and it makes it hard for them to get credit, especially small family farms.'” But how many small farms are included in that ten percent that receive nearly three quarters of federal subsidies?
Driving past the monotonous Minnesota fields with small stalks of corn far behind the traditional "knee-high by July" yardstick, I pass the same farmhouse nearly every day. It's a large, beige Victorian structure rising from the horizontal green that surrounds it. A young woman, maybe teenage, maybe slightly older, often sits on the cement steps on the side of the house looking over the familiar assortment of workhouses scattered around the gravel driveway. Sometimes she has a cigarette, sometimes she just seems to be waiting. When Jefferson argued for the small-farmer nation he did so because he felt it would tie citizens to the land and to their country. I take issue with the idea that city-dwellers don't have the same land-deep love for their homes, but I wonder about that woman dwarfed in a landscape of megafarms. What sense of place is left for her and how does such an obviously lopsided federal farm program shape the land she surveys alone each morning?
0 comments:
Post a Comment