A number of my commenters had much hilarity with my statement that farmers hate welfare. This isn't a normative statement, but a positive one: they hate welfare. Is it hypocritical of them to support farm subsidies? In one sense, no: qualifying for most farm subsidies involve quite a lot of hard, dirty labor. In another sense, absolutely, and there's a reason I don't discuss the virtues of milk-price supports with my relatives.
The core of the farmer aversion to welfare programs specifically is that old farmer maxim: "If you don't work, you don't eat." But there's a flip side to that: farmers never starve. They have lots and lots of other problems, and my grandparents' generation was very poor. But with land, they eat and keep roofs over their heads.
So there's a certain emotional resistance to the notion that it is necessary to provide food and shelter for able-bodied adults. And also a deep emotional resistance to going on assistance. They're much more sympathetic to disability, social security, and other transfers to the less able-bodied.
There's also the fact that one of the things that can make it very hard for a farmer to keep a roof over his head--aside from the debt he is prone to acquire during his more exuberant harvest seasons--is property taxes. They make near-subsistence farming nearly impossible.
None of this is any particular attempt to justify the rural worldview, or farm subsidies. It just is. You can rail against it, but it's no more stupid, incoherent or self-interested than the worldview of any other coherent demographic group I can identify.
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Thanks Megan. Makes me think about farm subsidies in a new way. I still am against it and all other subsidies. End all welfare!
If you end farm subsidies, how do farmers survive? If farmers don't survive, how do you have food on your table?
I hate welfare and handouts as much as anyone, but somehow, farm subsidies are a bit different.
If you end farm subsidies, how do farmers survive?
They don't. Farms shut down and the land returns to woods or praire until the price of food rises to the point that it makes sense to farm.
"Farms shut down and the land returns to woods or praire until the price of food rises to the point that it makes sense to farm."
Somehow I doubt that if farms shut down that the next best use of the land will be to have it lay fallow. More than likely bits and pieces of farms will be sold off to people who will develop the land in someway.
This is one of the reasons that while in principle I'm against farm subsidies, in practice I'm not so sure I'd be happy to see them go. Farmers have an incentive to keep large chunks of land undeveloped* since to be competitive you need to be big enough to get some economies of scale. If farm subsidies disappear, some farms will get bigger by gobbling up non-competitive farms, but I think quite a bunch of farmland will be turned into housing developments, strip malls, and data centers. While that might be the most efficient use of the resource, personally I like that we have a lot of empty farmland in the country.
*I realize that farmland is actually heavily developed, but it isn't developed in a way that offends my rich-liberal sensibilities like strip malls do.
DylanE - you are free to buy as much farmland as you can afford and keep it fallow. You are also free to get together with other like-minded people and join together to buy farmland to keep it fallow.
Given the deficit that the US government is running at the moment, expecting the US government to subsidise your preference for fallow farmland beyond what you can afford strikes me as a rather selfish attitude.
Excellent point. I don't know about you but I eat almost no soybean and, unintentionally, more corn (starch, oil, and sweetner) than I need. What else do we subsidize again?
Oh it is undoubtedly a selfish attitude. But to be fair to myself, I'm not actually suggesting we keep farm subsidies for this reason, and I've done my fair share of arguing against them among friends and family (and on the other side I've worked with a land trust to buy land from farmers in sensitive areas). I'm not arguing that my preferences are a reason to keep subsidies, I just thought I'd mention one possible benefit of the subsidies (at least to people like me)that I haven't really seen discussed before.
Dylan, the reason we don't discuss that benefit is that we don't regard it as a valid benefit for a public policy discussion.
Farmers survived before farm subsidies. But modern farming practices required debt financing for expensive equipment. Said equipment allowed farmers to grow lots more food, depressing the price of groceries and making it impossible for them to turn a profit on all that food their expensive equipment enabled them to grow.
If we curtail the subsidies, there will be hardship and bankruptcy, reducing the supply of food and making it more expensive. But food already is more expensive, we just pay part of our grocery bill at tax time and the other part at the checkout counter.
So ending subsidies will expose us to the real cost of our food, which has its good points, but at the cost of hardship for the poor.
Failed farmers can survive economically by becoming ex-farmers, and finding another line of work that enables them to support themselves and their families. They can even make use of that regular welfare which they so despise until they find themselves another line of work. As an alternative, they can sell their farms to successful farmers or agribusinesses, and become agricultural laborers for other more successful farmers.
"If you end farm subsidies, how do farmers survive?"
At the margins, they don't -- until the marginal farmer makes enough at the new intersection of the supply and demand curves to survive.
"If farmers don't survive, how do you have food on your table?"
We buy it from the farmers that do survive after the marginal ones are gone.
"I hate welfare and handouts as much as anyone, but somehow, farm subsidies are a bit different."
Clearly you don't and they aren't.
farmers grow other crops and raise other livestock. mixed-crop farms don't require subsidies and in fact are profitable.
that's why the whole thing is so ridiculous. farmers who have diverse farms aren't the ones who will starve if subsidies are cut, only the monocroppers, who are often paid to not even use their land.
You obviously do not spend much time on farms. A lot of cash grains produced in the US these days are used for two things: Ethanol, which is a scam, and feed for livestock.
Let the farmers go under. The market would naturally adapt; we as a country would eat less meat and ethanol would hopefully cease to be an option. And just maybe, we'd all use a little less vegetable oil. Tragic.
Too many people in the United States are content with thinking of the farmer as a noble man of myth and legend, like cowboys and indians. Put down the Willa Cather or Laura Ingalls Wilder, grow up and face reality. It's a job. If you're not making money at your job, the smart thing is to move onward and upward.
The demand curve for food is very, very inelastic. Probably the single most inelastic demand curve for any good that's bought or sold - gas is completely optional compared to food. In anything that bears even a passing resemblance to a market economy, you can make money selling food. Overproduction is a problem - as farmers get more efficient, we need fewer of them - but the solution to that isn't subsidies, it's for the farmers to get out of overstaffed legacy industries and into industries that actually need the labour. Yeah, some farmers will go out of business, but they should have been going out of business for 80 years now.
Lots of farmers receive subsidies for "setasides."
That is ... they are paid NOT to grow grain on their acres.
"If you don't work, we'll pay you."
That's welfare at its grandest.
Damn!! It's gonna snow in Florida tomorrow now that you and I agree on something.
I knew a lot of farmers in college, as I worked in a heavy equipment rental shop. They REALLY hate lazy people. This is probably because farming is a horrible amount of work that often results in very little income (in many cases much less than minimum wage). So naturally they tend to be resentful of people on welfare, esp. the ones not looking too hard for work.
There's an old farming joke about a farmer who wins the lottery and when a reporter asks him how he feels about it, he replies, "Well, this is just great. Now we can afford to farm another 30 years."
I'm against subsisdies, but I'm guessing farmers are doing pretty well right now anyway with the weaker dollar. (OTOH it's been a while since I checked the ag stats.)
Dairy farmers in particular are not doing well at all. It is to the point where many dairy farmers aren't making enough to pay even half of their bills.
Then they should stop being dairy farmers.
I think dairy farmers are getting hit in part by huge imports of milk like substances that are IIRC not even approved by the feds as a food item.
PD, what is a "milk like substance"? And who is buying it, if it's not legal to sell it as food?
Ah, here we go.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/agoutlook/aotables/2009/09Sep/aotab30.xls
2008 was apparently the best year ever for farmers. 2009 is forecast to be quite a bit worse.
That's interesting, subsidies went from over 10% of receipts in 2005 to under 4% in 2008.
That's because of the 2008 commodity boom. Revenues are trending back down.
Those appear to be direct payments to farmers. Farmers also receive indirect subsidies, at least corn farmers, from ethanol mandates.
That all said, the Midwest appears to be heading towards a record crop fail this year due to cool temperatures, wet conditions for bringing in the crops and mold and rot. That might bring about high commodity prices, but only the lucky one will get to cash in. The ethanol companies are driving tough bargains with farmers bringing in puny, blackened corn ears.
I would feel less hostile to farm subsidies if they weren't counter-productive to their stated intent (cue Blanche Lincoln in maximum twang)--"helping our hardworking fam-uh-leee farmers!"
Subsidies are part of the reason that property taxes are high in some rural areas. Many federal crop subsidies are tied to the production history of the land. In other words, the subsidies can be a revenue stream, which increases land values and thus property taxes. High land prices and property taxes in turn mean that only large agribusinesses can afford to put together profitable operations. So subsidies, instead of "saving family farmers", are actually hastening their decline.
qualifying for most farm subsidies involve quite a lot of hard, dirty labor
Yes, that's certainly how Sam Donaldson got them for his New Mexico angora goat ranch.
Mencken, "The Husbandman": "No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal indeed is known to students ... When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad he comes bawling for help out of the public till..."
More from Mencken's "The Husbandmen": "Back in the 1920’s they agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price–and instantly every party to the agreement began planting more cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up –and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury–in brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us."
The small farmer has always had a love/hate relationship with the cash economy. Till very recently (historically), many farmers only had a small cash crop or livestock business. The rest was internal consumption or local markets. Bankers, railroads, packers and all other middlemen were seen as profiteering at the expense of the toiling farmer. So the tendency to see subsidies as a leveling of the playing field was natural, however unrealistic.
Upstate NY Agriculture (like other industry in the Area) is increasingly uncompetitive. A little too small, a little too costly, and increasingly seen as either an environmental threat or backdrop to rural tourism it cannot compete.
So like everyone else north of Rt 17, they angle to get part of the pork from Albany paid for by taxing Goldman bonuses.
"So there's a certain emotional resistance to the notion that it is necessary to provide food and shelter for able-bodied adults. And also a deep emotional resistance to going on assistance. They're much more sympathetic to disability, social security, and other transfers to the less able-bodied."
Megan,
This describes many people who are not farmers, even liberal ones like me who support having a social safety net. That's why many workfare programs are politically popular even with people who live outside of rural areas.
Megan,
This is a totally fair point. But, at the end of the day, it speaks to mutual misunderstanding.
If you manage to hang on to your farm, you'll never suffer from unemployment. So the solution to economic distress, to a farmer, lies in policies that enable hard-working farmers to hang on to their means of support. Hence, subsidies, which buffer economic ups and downs and provide a measure of income security.
To a city dweller, on the other hand, economic downturns lead to insecurity. They may work incredibly hard, and still lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Since these things come in waves, they may be unable to find work at any wage, no matter how hard they try. So taking, say, unemployment benefits seems only right - it's that same buffer against a cyclical economy.
What raises my hackles is when either side frames this debate in moral, rather than economic, terms. To say that farmers "hate welfare" is accurate, but also disturbing; much as some of your commenters truly loathe farm subsidies. As policies, they have their flaws - but as moral dicta, they're entirely worthless.
Well, maybe because I'm a city dweller, I'm more sympathetic to welfare than permanent farm subsidies--though I'd scrap it for a negative income tax linked to work.
And here I thought it was because of Schumpeter - that at least the dislocations occasioned by unemployment are creative, and welfare plays a critical role in easing their pain and allowing for economic transition. Farm subsidies, on the other hand, are specifically designed to freeze in place the status quo.
It's not just an urban/rural thing, I guess. It's also a split between policies based on merit, and those based on effect. If the question is one of deserts - of rewarding hard work and effort - it makes sense to pay subsidies to keep people working hard at what they're already doing. If it's prospective, it sometimes makes more sense to allow people and businesses to fail, and then to help them bridge the gap until something else succeeds. (Why help them? Apart from moral considerations, we're a democracy. Large numbers of desperate people are not a healthy thing; if we want a dynamic and agile economy, we have to mitigate the collateral costs, or voters will opt for stability over growth without heed for the long-term consequences.)
Though, like you, I'm perfectly open to finding a different mechanism - with a different set of implied incentives - to ease those transitions.
Hmm. Some things to consider when considering farm subsidies:
Great Britain in WWI. Appalling hunger because they were importing their food, and the war attacked their supply.
Zimbabwe. Aren't you glad we weren't dependent on them for food when they decided to drive white farmers off their farms during the middle of a famine?
Although when food rationing was introduced during the Great War to the British citizenry, it had the unexpected effect of increasing the amount of food that was available to the lower classes.
I spent a few minutes but couldn't find the current breaksdown so I'm sure if this is still true, but in the 1980s the vast majority of government farm support payments were concentrated among a small % of farmers. Many of the latter were corporate farms and even those that weren't tended to have high net asset values (equipment and land). So they may indeed have been hardworking, but they had far higher family wealth than the US median.
I think you're right, or at least I share the recollection. I think there have been efforts to address this, but within the last few years I've read about corporate farms that are divided amongst family members, some of whom live nowhere near the farm and cannot by any meaningful use of the word be described as "farmers."
Megan,
I suspect that the opposition that farmers have to welfare for the unemployed comes less from an emotional resistance to the notion of providing food & shelter to the able-bodied, and more from a failure to realize that people who don't live in rural areas tend to not have subsistence farms. One wonders then if the widespread adoption of urban farming would lead then to a long-term decline of support for welfare among city residents.
I don't think that's quite right. Peoples' moral systems tend to fit their circumstances. That makes people in other circumstances look immoral.
That's why I'm so glad that my circumstances let me live up to the very highest of morals, unlike all of you immoral heathens...
Nicely put.
There's at least a perceived difference between unemployment insurance and welfare. One is temporary to get you to your next job. The other is the dole.
"Welfare as we know it" may have ended, but the meme live on.
"rural worldview...it's no more stupid, incoherent or self-interested than the worldview of any other coherent demographic group I can identify."
I wonder what small business owners would think of that assuming they are a coherent demographic group. I suspect that they too may hate welfare for the same reasons that farmers do, but I'm not aware of any tax payer funded programs that exist to keep them from going out of business. They pay property taxes as well, or have their rents affected by them, and lose or at least have to move their businesses when rates get too high. No one pays them for not producing goods or for not selling goods and services. And when they fail during a down time, they close and lose whatever they have invested in the enterprise, sometimes their life savings.
Farmers, as tough as their lives might be, should consider the rather privileged position they enjoy as business owners.
Megan --you seem far more up to date on farm subsidies than I am --
my understanding of subsidies is this:
for the big "corporate" farms that cover hundreds, if not thousands of acres -- the subsidies add some points of margin to an otherwise profitable enterprise (assuming no wild swings in commodities)
for family farms that cover less than 200 acres or so -- subsidies represent 100% of profit, excepting particularly good years.
the documentary "King Corn" is a pretty interesting look at corn farming-- and one of my takeaways from the movie was that that days of the "family" farm as anything other than a hobby are close to over.
It makes sense -- almost every other commodity type business is dominated by enormous producers who can produce with enough scale to produce adequate returns.
Only certain farms get subsidies. My wife is 1/3 owner (inheritance) of a 130 acre working farm in Jersey. In the past, they got some tiny little amounts, less than $200 per year, when they planted feed corn and wheat but they, the crops, proved unprofitable due to deer predation. With hay they get nothing. As far as I know, the veggie farmers don't get anything either. On Long Island, where we live, many have converted to majority horticultural.
As far as I know he ones that get the big money are very large grain farms.
Megan is correct about the effect of taxes. My wife's farm pays over 9000 per year - tied to the value of the rundown farmhouse mostly. NY used to have a max tax on farms of $100 per acre. That would mean that a 100 acre farm could be taxed at $10,000. It's driven quite a few farms out of business. NJ has low taxes on the cropland, but whacks you on structures, and the farmhouse (which is considered to be on 1 acre so you pay residential house taxes on one acre)
One thing to keep in mind about farming is weather. It's a killer. You can have too much or too little rain. If you sew and are hit by terrible rains right after, or when the stuff is just starting to pop, the whole crop can get killed. Then you have to wait for things to dry out, refurrow, and replant Seed is not cheap. During that time, you're still fighting weeds. Late thaws and early freezes can cause a 2 crop year to become a one crop year, so you earn 1/2 of what's planned.
Then you have equipment and ungodly maintenance on it. My wife's farm has a combine with corn and wheat heads, 2 tractors, umpteen disc harrows, seeders, herbicide sweepers, bailers, conveyors and 2 farm/crop trucks. All that stuff also consumes lots and lots of diesel. And again, they get exactly zero in any subsidies.
i am a farmer, and indeed i do hate the hell out of lazy people.
Farm Subsidies have taken a bizarre economic turn for what started as a defense policy. The idea that we could let americans farm less and import foreign food cheaper isn't new. But, as a nation, we decided that we might get "Pearl Harbor"ed again @ any moment and that long distance food supply chains tend to work poorly in those situations (see: England, WW1 and WW2 and "victory garden"). We decided that althougha huge standing military is wasteful in peacetime, you're never sure when peace time will end and go time begin. We decided verbatim the same w/farming. "food at the ready lest the worst befall us".
Funny how people loathing the farm subsidy never once, ever, attack the large peace-time standing army in the same sentance.
Either refigure domestic defense needs or STFU about subsidies, once and for all. Actually, I'm quite happy with either.
Both farm subsidies and standing armies are terrible ideas and anathema to a free res publica.
You'll have to count one now.
Actually, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) started in the 1930s, before Pearl Harbor. So, to borrow your charming language, you should STFU about farm subsidies until you can get basic facts right.
basic facts? starts out as a federal program in late '39, which as one might recall was a pretty gloomy year in peace and peace futures, and gets made a federal corp in the USDA in '48. Whatever happened pre-USDA is pretty fair to say wasn't a US Dep't of Agriculture policy.
One of the first subsidy programs for agriculture was the Morrill Act of 1862, which established the land-grant colleges. That was followed by the Hatch Act of 1887, which funded agricultural research, and by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which funded agricultural education
In 1929 the Agricultural Marketing Act created the Federal Farm Board, which tried to raise commodity prices by stockpiling production. After spending $500 million, this first major farm boondoggle was abolished in 1933.
A large array of farm subsidies were enacted during the 1930s, beginning with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.
Link
I see absolutely no reason to save family farms. If small farmers can't survive, then sell the farm to agribusiness and move to the city. Millions have done it. This has nothing to do with food supply. We could have a perfectly adequate food supply with six large companies producing all of our food.
I also don't belive that small farms can't survive, because of the demand for local and organic produce. People pay a lot of $$ for that stuff. But again if they can't be profitable, then they should go out of business. Like pretty much every other enterprise on earth.
The big problem with farm subsidies is how much they hurt poor people in poor countries. You think it's hard to survive in America as a small farmer? Try surviving in Pakistan or Kenya when you are competing with crops produced at ten times your productivity (because of much better equipment) AND federal government subsidies. I don't remember who it was who said it, but it's true: the most effective anti-poverty policy in the entire world would be to end European and American farm subsidies.
What's really a killer is that first we pay subisidies to US farmers, which causes unemployment and poverty worldwide. Then, to combat that poverty, we spend billions more on foreign aid
My upstate New York family, my in laws, are farmers and hate subsidies because they are fruit farmers (mostly apples), and fruit farmers don't get subsidies. They're in Columbia county, in the Hudson valley, and the last time we looked (it was on the internet) the biggest agrisubsidy receiver in Columbia county was a Rockefeller! One of the rich ones. She owned a lot of farmland, but she didn't farm it either.
As far as our hostesses take on upstate NY types, I think she's pretty spot on. Per social conservatism, they are socially conservative in that they get really ticked if your domestic arrangements lead to a need for welfare, which if one follows the social conservative script one generally won't, and they're not against abortion, or at least enthusiastically, though they are against the govt paying for one.
There's an interesting discussion of farm subsidies in Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. For the most part -- California agribusiness being the big exception -- fruit and veggie growers don't get them. In fact, unless the law has changed, growing vegetables on designated "corn" acreage can jeopardize *all* of your subsidies, not just the subsidies for those acres.
Which means that the current subsidy regime actively encourages a massive oversupply of corn -- with all sorts of pernicious side effects -- while actively discouraging (outside of California) growth of fruits and vegetables.
So it's quite a bit more complicated than "end subsidies and watch farmers go under." More like "phase out subsidies, and watch production line up with demand."
Agree entirely. Farm subsidies are probably, on aggregate, the single worst economic policy that the American government has ever foisted on the country. Whether or not they were a good idea in the Great Depression (opinion is mixed), they have certainly been a disaster since WWII.
And, perhaps not coincidentally, it's a been a perfectly bipartisan boondoggle.
It's worth remembering that farm subsidies are the direct result of the Madisonian Compromise. They exist because a lot of states that have no business having 2 votes in the Senate have them. And because we use the idiotic counting rule known as the electoral college, which gives swing states such tremendous, disproportionate influence in federal elections.
For those who oppose the national popular vote initiative (largely on partisan grounds, I would imagine, although there is a fair amount of conventional wisdom inertia as well), understand that our present system gives us farm subsidies almost automatically.
If it was only "states that have no business having 2 votes in the Senate" that was the problem, wouldn't the House of Representatives be able to stop such boondoggles? Is Delaware a big supporter of farm subsidies?
I don't know, but I wouldn't really be surprised. Most of Delaware is pretty rural. If I recall correctly, there's a significant amount of chicken farming there.
A number of commenters have suggested that removing subsidies would result in the end of farming. I write from Australia and US readers may (or may not) know that us and New Zealand have virtually zero agricultural subsidies. Not entirely coincidentally, we are among the most efficient farms in the world. Does this mean that farmers are going out of business? Yep, inefficient farms leave the industry every year and there is a fair amount of switching between crops and animals in response to changing prices. But we are still both major farming nations who export massively and in fact our major problem is access to world markets caused by trade distortions from the EU and US's appalling agricultural subsidy regime.
I might add that we are far from free of farmers whinging against imports, the weather and any other reason to justifiy agrarian socialism, it's just that by and large these calls are ignored.
Yep. Right on.
There is a case to made in favor of government subsidies in strategically important, infant industries. Solar power might be just an example (I said "might"). If the US develops outstanding solar power IP and production facilities, it can be a driver of high-productivity growth for a generation. It might be worth some short-term market distortion to achieve that result.
But government subsidies in mature industries like agriculture make no sense at all. Like most subsidies most everywhere, they encourage inefficiency.
As far as I know, "He who does not work, does not eat" ("Kto ne rabotaet, tot ne est") is a Stalinist slogan used in part to legitimate the imposition of famine against enemies of the regime in the 1930s, and then for many decades to prosecute people for the crime of being unemployed. A quick Google search turns up no appearances of the slogan before its appearance in 1924 in the USSR, though I'm happy to be corrected.
There's also a funny modern-folk song by Brodiagi that communicates one of the great truths of modern capitalist Russia: "Kto ne rabotaet, tot est; a kto rabotaet, tot piot." ("He who does not work, eats (i.e. "profits"); while he who works, drinks.")
My quick Google search turns up 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, If any will not work, neither let him eat."
I also seem to remember that John Smith in Jamestown said something along the same lines: http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/captainjohnsmith3
I searched on [don't work don't eat] and [don't work eat "john smith"].
"Is it hypocritical of them to support farm subsidies? In one sense, no"
I have a friend that operates a large dairy farm in Michigan. I've talked to him on different occasions about all the different subsidies. In short, he says that "people would revolt if they had to pay for what it really costs to produce a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread". He's a pretty straight forward guy so I take him at his word.
Firstly, people do have to pay for what it really costs to produce a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. If governments subsidise farms we pay at least the same amount in tax as we save at the shop till (and probably more given the deadweight and administrative costs of taxes and subsidies). There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Secondly, as iolanthe says, NZ and Australia do not subsidise farmers. NZers and Australians have not revolted at the cost of paying $1-$2 a litre of milk.
"Firstly, people do have to pay for what it really costs to produce a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread"...but not at the point of purchase. A 100% increase (or so) in products that involved meat, grains and milk would indeed cause a hysteria even if there was an equivalent amount deducted elsewhere (which wouldn't happen).
No we don't pay the same amount in taxes. We borrow it, and put the cost on future generations. If we really had to pay for things in taxes, cutting government spending would be a much higher priority. That is why, counter-intuitively, raising taxes, rather than cutting them, actually leads to a cut in government spending. It gets people to start paying attention.
Farm subsidies are an insurance policy against food disruptions that the modern world is totally unprepared to handle. If you take a pure libertartian stand against them, you should ask yourself what plan you have in place for famine caused by weather or disease. At a minimum, you should be in the habit of gardening and raising a few chickens or at least have an idea how you would do so under duress. It could still happen even with subsidies.
Smaller markets such as Australia and New Zealand enjoy the protection of stable prices because North American production generates a supply that is predictable. To compare them to the United States is anecdotal at best.
With any luck, the majority of the agricultural world will embrace genetically modified seeds and crops. If not, the rate of population growth will overwhelm the productive capacity of the world's farms in the next century or so.
From a theoretical view, subsidies should be viewed like any other product or service. If we were talking about cars or electronics or other products, they would be disruptive to competition and equilibrium. For the sake of maintaining civil order and avoiding disastrous outcomes, I'm going to hope we don't.
Food production is known to be variable. Hence, people keep stockpiles, often fairly big ones. Hence, we haven't had a serious famine in a developed country since, what, Ireland in the 1840s?
Also, how exactly do subsidies, which often take the form of paying people to reduce production, increase supply?
I understood Gary Owen's point to be that some sort of domestic farming apparatus/infrastructure is preserved or kept on the ready by paying farmers to stay in business even when they "shouldn't" be in business, according to the market. His argument may be a good one or may be a bad one, but it doesn't seem to rely on any assertion about increasing supply in the mean time.
And, what's this stuff about keeping stockpiles?
"not having a serious famine" is setting the bar pretty darn low, no?
Farm subsidies, as they are set up today, resemble a disease with a vicious cycle like congestive heart failure. Farm subsidies today reward massive monocrop, high yielding farms. The more you plant and higher yield attained the more money you get from the government. It isn't profitable to plant small acreages of polycultures. Farmers attempt to yield massive quantities to gain more profit. That yield floods the market and drives prices lower. The response is to produce even higher yields to continue to make the same profit. This continues to flood the market and prices continue to fall. Get the picture? This puts farmers in other countries, like Mexico, out of work and they come to the US for a job. Real farmers don't win. Multi-national food corporations win. Farmers are placed on welfare to keep commodity prices low so corporations have extremely cheap resources to keep profit margins high.
If you think that tons of "cheap" food is a good thing then you should entertain the idea that "cheap" food is an illusion. Just think of all the obesity, diabetes, heart disease, drug resistant disease, and environmental damage that has been created by the modern industrialized agriculture system. While destroying the environment, we are feeding and breeding a diseased welfare state that costs trillions of dollars. Farm subsidies have destroyed local, polyculture farms that would have allowed natural population growth in a more environmentally friendly way. It will only take time before nature outsmarts human beings and ravages our monoculture farms like the sitting ducks they are. We will starve one day with the current system as well.
Of course, when you live in suburbia it is hard to accept the fact that you would starve to death today without monoculture farms that are ran by corporate barons. Perhaps those incapable of growing their own food are the ones on welfare and not the farmers…just a thought. I encourage everyone to read Michael Pollan’s books on the food system, if you haven’t already.
"provide food and shelter for able-bodied adults"
I am not sure which welfare progam is it that provides food and shelter for able-bodied adults?
Do you know which program farmers generally have in mind?
No one has mentioned free market capitalism. If we let the free market set the prices and determine who stays in business as a farmer won't we all be better off? Or does that only apply to the financial sector?
So there's a certain emotional resistance to the notion that it is necessary to provide food and shelter for able-bodied adults.
Hmmmm, what about "able-bodied" adults who can't find a job?