House Speaker Mike Johnson is yet again running into his usual problem: He has a strong caucus that just wants to cut spending on everything, but on each individual topic he also has a strong caucus that wants to keep spending high. Meanwhile Democrats watch on blandly. The latest fight is over adding a few billion dollars to the upcoming farm subsidy bill:
Republicans in agriculture-heavy states and some Democrats have warned about a crippling economic crisis hitting rural America, which overwhelmingly supported Trump in the last election.
Rep. John Duarte (R-Calif.) said the farm aid “needs to be a part of any end of year actions. U.S. farmers across our nation are simply at the end of their debt and equity resources,” Duarte said.
Is this true? The USDA maintains vast resources dedicated to farm income, but the complexity of the farm sector combined with the complexity of US farm subsidy programs make it all but impossible to extract reliable numbers for the things non-experts like us are interested in.
But let's take a crack at it anyway. First, here are farm subsidies over the past couple of decades:
These figures don't include all indirect subsidies, which are mostly price supports. I think. In any case, these are still pretty close to correct as totals and give you the basic lay of the land. Subsidies were fairly steady until they skyrocketed in 2019 and 2020 to make up for Donald Trump's tariffs and then the COVID pandemic. Since then they have indeed fallen to recent lows.
But that's not the whole story. About two-thirds of all subsidies go to big commercial farms—which account for only 10% of all farms but the vast bulk of farm acreage.
So how much do subsidies affect farm income? Here is approximate total US farm income before and after subsidies:
Income has fallen from its pandemic heights but is still well above its recent average. However, here's some context: The only farms that make money from farming are big commercial farms. Non-commercial farms (both small and medium size) make about -$2,000 per year in farm income. Essentially all of their income comes from outside jobs and government payments.
Keeping that in mind, here is median total household farm income:
This is median, so it's not affected by the outsize income of commercial farms. The bottom line is that small and medium size farms do OK compared to the average household. They just do it mostly with non-farm income.
What does this all mean? Subsidies have definitely declined. If you're not anti-subsidy in general it's pretty easy to make a case for boosting them back up to their pre-pandemic level.
However, the macro evidence doesn't suggest that American farms are in great distress. They're down from pandemic peaks, but basically doing fine—with the caveat that for most of them "fine" is due to outside income, not farming itself.
Finally, if you're hard-hearted you might take a look at this and conclude that smallish farms are doomed and we should accept reality and let them all get bought out by productive commercial farms—and then cut subsidies completely since corporate agriculture can hedge good and bad years without any help from Uncle Sugar. This is especially appealing because even small farms are generally worth well over $1 million. Selling out the family heritage may be emotionally distressing, but it does have monetary compensations.
But that's only if you harbor coastal elitist disdain for our hard-working yeoman heartland farmers. Which you probably do, don't you, since you're all just a bunch of sniveling, woke, keyboard-clacking leftists who have never done an honest day's work in your lives.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
So there…
I am somewhat dubious that family farming is survivable on the longer time scale - or at least the need for really large scale crop insurance is going to become pressing and the economics of that strike me as rather speculative. With greater weather variability, the profitability of any individual farm is going to be questionable, in that it becomes more likely that any individual farm will have too many runs of bad harvests. Corporate farms that are widely dispersed geographically will be better able to survive as their dispersal will provide additional protection against weather issues - note I did not say protect, I said better protection.
I think you've got this completely backward. Small, diversified farms have potential for multiple income streams.
Large farms that do one thing have only insurance to depend upon when things go sideways. This is a problem of monoculture, and large farms are usually monoculture farms.
But living in Maine gives one a very, very different view of farming than living in the midwest or west. This is the only state where the numbers of farms and farmers are increasing; and many of the farms that I know do support families; though doing non-farm winter work (logging, snow making, snow plowing, etc.) is common.
"you're all just a bunch of sniveling, woke, keyboard-clacking leftists who have never done an honest day's work in your lives"
How did Kevin discover this secret we've concealed from the world? (until now)
What sorcery is this?
How dare he? I did an honest day's work once. It was August 14, 1982. I remember it well.
My cousin farms in Iowa. His farm is huge, about 2,000 acres (it actually belongs to him and his brother). Their financial advisor has repeatedly pointed out to them that they could sell the land for close to $30M and make more money than they get from farming by just putting the proceeds into an index fund. They stay at it because they like the life. But their own sons probably won't.
More power to them.
I'm instinctively sympathetic, but:
How is this different than my deciding to keep my M-F job but try to make a go of selling furniture I make in my garage shop on weekends - AND - I want the government to subsidize my hobby/business?
Where's the line between hobby (probably shouldn't be subsidized by the taxpayer) and business (justifies subsidies because the nation needs a strong farm sector)?
Would my example above be different if I was growing some vegetables to sell in the local farmers market?
What Five was describing did not sound like weekend/hobby farming.
Personally, I would be sympathetic to the vegetable hobbyist over the furniture hobbyist in so far as people don't eat chairs.
You're right. I was conflating Kevin's "Essentially all of their income comes from outside jobs and government payments" with Five's story, and further, with other stories about gentlemen farmers and ranchers who get taxpayer subsidies on their country vacation homes. Thanks for bringing me back down.
For the farm's I know, there is usually one spouse farming and one spouse working outside the home.
And health insurance from a full time job from that spouse working outside is the single most valuable part of the job, too. Way more important to the family's security than the income from the job.
Where's the line? That might involve how much capital you need to put into the woodworking machinery for that garage shop. It's been a long time since I've seen concrete numbers but my memory is that even a small non-Amish farm these days needs equipment that takes at least 5 zeroes to total up, ie in the hundreds of thousands. Reliable cash flow in that kind of situation is the major worry, I'd think, and that means crop insurance, price floors, and other kinds of socialized back-up if we value having them around. Like with the milk pricing formula discussion here several weeks back.
I had a co-worker who's extended family includes ownership of ~ 40,000 acres in Eastern Oregon, by no means all farmable. Harvest time the extended family gets < 20 people to run the harvesters. And even so, I think they make more money from renting the woods to hunters during deer season. A few years ago they lost part of the wheat harvest to a significant forest / grass fire shortly before harvest.
2000 acres in Iowa is a small farm, (unless he is on some river bed and can farm vegetables.)
It's been a while but I used to know people like that. They worked full time jobs and then farmed on off hours and weekends. I think it was more satisfying for them to do that than reporting to a manager during the week.
But should you and I subsidize such people out of our taxes?
I like reading books on weekends. Should the government help pay for them?
Do you want rural countryside maintained with little farms and markets...
...or do you want it all fenced off by the corporations?
"Do you want rural countryside maintained with little farms and markets..." why would anyone want that. And little farms are every bit as fenced off as corporate farms.
Why should I care?
I care that we have lots of good cheap food at acceptable cost to the environment. Corporate farms do this far better than family farms.
All real working farms are fenced off.
"I like reading books on weekends. Should the government help pay for them?"
Government already pays for kids to read. Want to join the kids? Oh, wait…
Rural states are red. Red states voted for Trump. Trump wants to cut spending. Just more “ I never thought the party of leopards eating faces would eat my face”.
RE: The big farmers get most of the subsidies.
Back in the mid 1950's my uncle who farmed doctors, lawyers and other of the petit bourgeoisie who wanted to play gentleman farmer, told me that is where the money goes.
Hey, keyboard-clacking is how I used to do an honest day's work!
Apropos of nothing, my grandmother inherited a family farm in Iowa, 160 acres. It was sold upon her death for a few hundred thousand dollars. The buyer owned a few other such properties, and farming for him was a part-time occupation, thanks to herbicides and automation.
Re: Big Farms
I was skiing and conversing with two guys who told me they ran a diary. They said it was small only 2000 cows. Years ago I was reading a lawyer mag and it had an article about the legal problems of a group that was trying to get permits for a 30,000 cow diary. As a kid I was farmed off to my uncle who ran a 30 cow diary.
So, do the cows dictate their diary entries, or do you actually teach them to write/type?
I read an expose (here: https://www.abebooks.com/9780743461511/Click-Clack-Moo-Cows-Type-0743461517/plp?ref_=ps_ms_267691761&cm_mmc=msn-_-comus_dsa-_-naa-_-naa&msclkid=67285aa8470b159ac1b93dc83520f983) about cows writing; not clear if their writing was into a diary or more of a business communication.
A dairy is where they process and package milk, make ice cream (and often frozen diners and other processed food for grocery stores, milk production is seasonal and you need to keep the workers busy in both the summer and winter) for the grocery store and are generally owned by international conglomerates (like Nestle). It has nothing to do with farms other than as a customer.
>> Finally, if you're hard-hearted you might take a look at this and conclude that smallish farms are doomed and we should accept reality and let them all get bought out by productive commercial farms<<
Back in 1995 I was working for the California Department of Food and Agriculture and Republican Ann Veneman was appointed California Secretary of Agriculture. At our annual meeting she came in to deliver a two minute speech in which she informed us that we would soon be out of jobs because the future was corporate farms and that family farms (the group we were designed to serve) would soon be a thing of the past. Her demeanor was very unpleasant and dismissive of the work we did. After speaking she left, leaving something of a pall on the proceedings. The next speaker, a representative of a co-op group tried to give a counter argument, but most of us were pretty depressed.
So, thirty years later, this isn’t exactly a new argument.
How many fewer family farms are there now in California than there were in 1995? Was Veneman entirely wrong, or was the error more one of timeframe?
There are far fewer family farms in California but the vast majority are still family owned. I think a lot of farms have been lost to urbanization. When I moved to San Francisco in 1980 most of the land east of Hwy 101 in the San Jose area was flower growers. Today they are all gone and the area is mostly business parks. Also, I think there has been some consolidation with land perhaps owned by two or three families now owned by one.
There are probably about 1/4th the number of farm owners now as in 1980.
Depends on what you call "family." There are billionaire farm families in the CA Central Valley.
Once.
Food prices today, accounting for inflation, are far lower than they were in, say, the 1950's. A gallon of milk in 1950 was around $.83 -- that's like $9 today. Last time I looked, we were paying like half that. Farmers actually made money from farming at one point, but consolidation in the processing and grocery industries, as well as foreign imports, have driven prices down substantially making it nearly impossible to turn a profit unless you're an enormous operation that can effectively take advantage of subsidies, tax write-offs, and other economies of scale.
As I've said a number of times before, the biggest applause line you could get at a rally in farm country these days is to pledge to bust up the big ag processing and seed conglomerates, bust up the grocery supply oligopolies, and rewrite subsidy and tax policy to give smaller growers and ranchers a shot rather than just the big corporate juggernauts. As far as I know, the only Dem in recent memory to do anything like that was Elizabeth Warren during her brief presidential run and then it was memory-holed for some reason.
The problem is, of course, is that if farmers make more money, that's eventually going to cost consumers more and as we now know, if you have to pay more than $2/doz for eggs, voters are willing to burn the fucking country to the ground, so maybe it's not worth it and we should all just learn to live on Soylent Green for $1 a day in the future.
The whole history of farming since the Industrial Revolution began has been a trend to bigger farms using less labor. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, something like 90% of the population were farmers and their families. The last time I heard, it's now about 3%. That's an awful lot of farmers driven off the land over the centuries. Obviously, the process has not ended.
Kevin spends a lot of time writing about fully autonomous cars. It seems to me that fully autonomous farm machinery should be easier; the machines can operate in relatively small (a few square miles) well delineated areas with, if needed, fixed markers to guide the machines. Once fully autonomous farm machines hit the market, for bulk crops like grain or soybeans I can visualize a single farmer running a farm the size of Kansas. Any farm smaller than multiple square miles will simply not be viable.
I expect those autonomous farm machines will also displace immigrant stoop labor on berry and vegetable farms before long, too.
For things like grains, labor is already not a cost factor. The human in the GPS guided tractor is just there to deal with the unexpected events.
The tasks are much harder to automate for crops that require more than 1 human per acre to tend and harvest. The safety bar to get over is a lot lower than it is for self-driving cars but the tasks themselves are way harder and not just due to the data processing side of things. It is difficult to develop hardware that is good at picking berries and not damaging either the plant or the berry. I have this argument with people all the time about whether human shaped robots are a boondoggle. It turns out having visual and auditory sensors at the top of a structure with appendages on either side for manipulating things works pretty well.
There is also a downside to breeding your crops for easy automate harvesting. There will always be a market for food that is bred and raised to taste good instead of being easy to harvest. It is why I can sell a pint of something at my farmstand for 2-3x what you would pay at the grocery for the "same" vegetable.
It's true that the hardware is lagging the software when it comes to automated crop picking machines. From the software viewpoint, however, I don't believe that farm tasks are more difficult than driving on a road. On the road, you have other traffic, stop signs, pedestrians, wandering animals, traffic signals, road repair, and snow, none of which should be found in a farm field during the part of the year that it is worked. Compared to dealing with that, deciding when a strawberry is ready to be picked should be really simple.
Googles ai tool says farmers are 1.3% of the population.
The last time I heard was obviously quite a while ago. One of the hazards of getting older is that you remember as "recent" things that happened forty or fifty years ago.
All of this sort of leaves out an important issue, one that vanished with the family farm when mechanization and fertilizers took over farming after WWII, and that's regional sustainability.
Can your region feed itself? Do you need to import your food? Can the farms around a city feed the city?
If not, at least at a basic level, something is seriously broken. But I'm one of those hippies who thinks vegetable gardens are better than lawns and who believes the California and Arizona have created a dependency on their food without water security to support that dependency. So I think, long term, the single best investment we can make is to encourage the growth of small family farms and make sure that those farms produce a living wage. (And maybe better water-shed protections.)
I'd also like if it most of my food was not sprayed with poisons; as Rachel Carson suggested, this is not a good idea.
This is also, I need to point out, a human concern and place where being MAGA or woke simply does not matter. All humans need nutritious food.
If you believe in sustainability, you should hate family farms and their inefficiency and lack of productivity.
How big is the region you refer to? I live in an area where the main crop is trees. There are enough hobby farmers around that you can buy some food in season from the local farmers' market, but most of our food comes from at least hundreds and more often thousands of miles away. However, people want lumber, which is milled and shipped out in quantities large enough to pay for both food and manufactured goods to be shipped in. To get a region that could feed itself, you would have to draw a circle of at least a thousand miles radius around my home town.
I would consider them first by biome; since within a certain type of soil, climate, and water supply there is a certain things that will thrive vs. things that need more assistance vs. things that don't grow there. Within biome, political and cultural boundaries. Blueberries from Maine are great. I love coffee from the tropics, too. I'm not against global trade of foods; places have flavors and that is very much at the heart and joy of life here on earth.
Cheap food too often comes at the cost of the connection to the ways and means of our sustenance, traditional food ways, and degrades farmland. Not to mention the health of the people who eat that food.
The quote you replied too claimed that equity and and debt were the issues and yet you decided to go on and on about income?
"Industrial Revolution" is key. Buying tractors and equipment requires cash. Before the IR a family could live okay by owning 40 acres and a mule. But a tractor requires money, gained by expanding the operation, which is enabled by the tractor, etc.
Before IR, a farmer could milk a few cows by hand. These days you need robotic milking machines which cost 6 figures, plus some migrants tfor your thousand(s) of cows.
Before the IR, a family could make a bare living by owning 40 acres and a mule (plus plow, reaper etc.). Those farmers survived mainly by eating much of their crops and selling a relatively small part for the cash they needed. Absent power machinery, bigger "private" farms were also not possible. The big farms, aka plantations required lots of cheap labor, in the form of slaves, serfs, or sharecroppers, which meant a comfortably rich owner plus probably hundreds of workers who lived one inch from starvation.
I wouldn't call it coastal elite disdain. I just thing every one of these assholes needs to get exactly what they voted for.
Because of generous crop insurance and subsidies and even direct payments if things get really bad ( like high Chinese tariffs) almost all the economic risk has been taken out farming by the government. So in reality, ag policy for most farms, which in day and age are almost all big, combined operations of once separate family operations, is still important but not to the degree it once was if you were truly a mid-sized producer.
The fact we don't have a farm bill right now is reflection of this. If you're old enough you can remember farm protests of the late 70s and early 80s, farmers driving convoys of tractors to Washington D. C ., protesting at auctions, because there were a lot of mid-sized producers and they were getting squeezed. Now you have your big combined operations, hobby farms and the Amish/Mennonites (Don't laugh! They have big families who need farms and they'll happily buy you out if you are desperate to get out. Their population has grown considerably). There's no farm bill and hardly anyone gives a shit because until the new one is passed the same policy stays in place from current bill, which benefits the farm economy as it is now. Thus, other topics besides farm policy resonate in rural America on top of the fact there are fewer farms. And you all know what I am talking about.