Never in the history of the world has farming been as easy or as productive as it is today. For that, we can thank farm technology, food storage advances, and our sharp scientific understanding of what makes food grow.
The result is an unprecedented bounty that would have been unthinkable a century ago. Today, the average American wage laborer has a wide range of fresher and more nutritious food options than even kings did in the not-so-distant past. Nothing is out of reach, not even foods out of season.
Net farm incomes have declined a bit in recent years but are nevertheless at an average $93,000, well above the national household median income of just under $60,000.
Despite this, farmers are treated by Uncle Sam as though they were hard cases, unable to succeed without extensive government subsidies and manipulation of crop prices. Agriculture has thus become one of the least free markets.
The story of how it happened is a long and sad one. After World War I ended, Washington bailed out farmers so they wouldn’t suffer from the price collapse caused by wartime overproduction. Each intervention not only failed but made things worse. From then on, Congress rubber-stamped one bad idea after another involving government manipulation of agriculture. Sometimes it established funds to buy foodstuffs on the open market, leaning on taxpayers to drive up prices. Sometimes it set production quotas, and punished farmers for growing too much. Sometimes it paid farmers for not growing food.
And that’s not the half of it.
Today, farm policy is a similar dodgy and hard-to-justify patchwork of government payouts, protectionist quotas, and price fixing. Taxpayers subsidize crop insurance, for example, that isn’t so much intended to pay for a damaged crop as it is to compensate farmers if they can’t sell at a high enough price. The government covers 62 percent of the cost of the insurance it makes available through this program.
The government also has special programs for various crops. It makes sugar artificially expensive through strict import quotas and subsidized lending in which the sugar itself is the collateral. The only point of this is to enrich a very small handful of influential growers.
The government encourages overproduction of corn by ordering refiners to add inordinate quantities of corn ethanol to the fuel supply. The government props up peanuts with guaranteed prices above market rate. It restricts imports on other crops in order to keep prices high.
Again, we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of how unfree the market is. Which is ridiculous, because farming has never been easier.
In the budget he presented last year, President Trump gave strong hints that he intended to crack down on this farm socialism. He hoped to eliminate crop insurance subsidies for farmers earning more than half a million dollars a year, and to limit the subsidy to $40,000 per policy.
Unfortunately, the farm bill Congress is slated to consider doesn’t do this or much else useful. Rather than set agriculture back on the path to market economics, it doubles down on the failed policies of the last century, putting changes in place that will increase taxpayer funding of farming, expand covered crops, and make even more people eligible to claim up to $125,000 in annual subsidies by expanding the definition of “family member.”
One provision would even study the creation of a national marketing program to sell the rocks that farmers dig up while tilling the land.
The government should get out of farming entirely. Sadly, the only part of the farm bill that seems to be on the chopping block is the food stamp program, which assuredly needs reform. Food stamp rolls are 50 percent higher than they were before the financial crisis, 42 million households, up from 28 million in 2008. People capable of supporting themselves should be shaken out of the system, so help is properly targeted at those in most need.
But if you’re getting tough on people making $30,000 a year, it is also time to stop sending fat checks to farmers with six-figure incomes. This won’t happen until the party supposedly committed to free enterprise stops voting for farm socialism.
