America's Wealthy Welfare Farmers

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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{{ There’s one bloated federal government agency that routinely hands out money to millionaires, billionaires, insurance companies and even members of Congress. The handouts are supposed to be a safety net for certain rural business owners during tough years, but thousands of them have received the safety-net payments for 39 consecutive years. And tens of thousands of those recipients are actually city dwellers, including a resident of a Palm Beach mansion down the street from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Unfortunately, the current safety net is more like an automatic profit generator for row-crop farmers in good years as well as bad. The problems begin with the supposedly “countercyclical” agricultural subsidies that were conceived during the New Deal to get struggling farmers through future Dust Bowls but have become a perennial entitlement for growers of the Big Five commodities — corn, soy, cotton, wheat and rice. The Environmental Working Group has documented that 10,000 farmers have received those payments every year for four decades — even though the average food stamp recipient receives aid for under a year. And the payments are structured by farm size, so the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients receive three-quarters of the subsidies. }}

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/opinion/republicans-trump-derangement-syndrome.html

The Reagan deceit was the lie that “single mothers on food stamps” we causing the fraud.

intercst

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Yes, and as more and more farm land is owned by large corporations it gets worse.

The challenge is to come up with a farm bill that protects our traditional family farm while making it tougher for the really big guys to collect.

Yes, their lawyers are clever and splitting their operations into smaller units that look like family farms. How do you deal with that?

If the family farmer goes away imagine being dependent on the likes of Proctor & Gamble to feed us. They are very good at raising prices and pocketing the profits.

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Why? Do we protect our neighborhood welding shop? Is there a program to keep my local mechanic garage in business? How about one for the pizza joint that’s going under since Domino’s move in next door?

What is it about “the traditional family farm” that’s so bloody important?

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My theory is: The sappy talk about “protecting family farmers” was seeded (farmer joke) years ago when those in-the-know (corporations) could see (because they were orchestrating it) the actual “family farm” was no longer sustainable and was going away. But, they wanted government freebies, so they came up with this “American values” false-consciousness thing about farmers and slowly insinuated themselves into the money stream. They did have to allow the existence of a certain number of actual family farms as a red herring so people wouldn’t see what was really happening in the farm business

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It’s a “traditional American family values” totem, like George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, or throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac. In my experience, farmers of every stripe are the most skilled whiners I have ever seen. No matter what, they are always whining about how they are barely scraping by, and they need more government handouts and more protection from competition. There was an incident reported, several years ago, about a candidate for POTUS, talking with some farmers in Iowa. When the cameras were rolling, the farmers were crying a river about how hard the farming life is. After the cameras were turned off, the candidate asked one of the farmers what he was going to do next. The guy, who had been whining about how poverty struck they were, for the cameras, said he and his wife were heading out to Hawaii for the next three months.

Steve

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Productive farm land is one of our major assets. Ag businesses using and processing those commodities are drivers of the economy. Ag products keep much of that processing in the US.

It’s in our best interest to keep that land producing. That requires making a profit. That depends very much on Congress making good laws.

Labor shortage has been addressed by mechanized farming. That million dollar combine favors large farms. Family farms are traditional and make it work. We should keep them.

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Painting with a pretty broad brush there Steve! And speaking of whining… oh never mind.
Growing up in a farm based family, mostly in the 60s, I knew many farmers, some were complainers, as in any walk of life. Some were poor business people and left farming for other lines of work. But you didn’t farm for long if you weren’t hard working.
Per Goofy, farming was, and still is, a business and should be treated as such. I still see and endeavor to support small family farms today, but they’re specialized, mostly organic based. It remains a lifestyle choice of occupation, not one you choose to get wealthy, but rather to live a healthy and personally fulfilling life. Ever been to a farmers market? Highly recommended if interested in consuming a non-processed food diet. Home gardening also works for that. But if processed and fast food diets are your thing, that’s fine with me, as it’s your choice. For the time being, we still live in a somewhat free country, we’ll see where that goes…

Otis
Wasn’t dedicated enough to choose that lifestyle, but enjoys dabbling a bit in retirement.

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When my mom retired, she moved to a retirement community in Arizona. Many of her neighbors were retired farmers. She said that her neighbors were saying the same thing: the farmers that fail, by and large, were poor farmers.

But the “family farm” is a totem that is worshiped. Same with “small business”. Both are the beneficiary of government subsidies.

A battle has been brewing, for years: big oil vs big ethanol. I wonder if there will be movement in this administration?

Steve

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Welcome Otis! Steve is knowledgable, friendly, and sometimes a little opinionated, and your response was a pleasure to read.

As a frenetic cook, I have long depended on the “family farms” as my preferred source of vegetables and meats. I my experience the “family” of the family farm are increasingly an owner manager worker group that is a mix between a dominant (sometimes nuclear) family(s) and associated friends, or even a quasi-commune — and almost always smaller scaled compared to agro-business, both as to optimal land area worked and greater dependence on skilled specialized human labor in place of investment in ever more sophisticated and robotic mechanisms, fertilizer, and insect control.

Here in Mexico I am a regular customer of this bunch

who provide a big variety of full flavored, organic, no insecticide, highest quality vegetables to my stove and tables. Choose the “Order Now” button to see the big variety they provide from their enclosed greenhouse with Tilapia pools sheds.

The real question for me is whether USAians will continue down their current disastrous path of eating ever more highly chemicalized and processed food, maxing out on corporate farm commoditized “nutrient” production, or take a step back towards better diets and more opportunity for the more labor intensive styles of produce farming I remember from my youth.

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If we didn’t have opinions, there would not be much to discuss, would there?

My grandfather was a mechanic by trade, but liked to play farmer. He had about 4 acres with a variety of fruits and vegetables growing. We always had fresh produce on the table in the summer. and my grandmother canned and froze a lot to have over the winter.

I don’t have a “cook” gene tho. :^)

Steve

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To be clear Steve, I find your posts to be a wealth of information as are those by FB, Goofy and quite a number of the regulars on METAR. I appreciate the various views expressed, even those with which I don’t necessarily agree. The knowledge shared on this board is beneficial in helping me keep my pesky ego in check. :face_with_rolling_eyes:

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Best council I ever got here was to stand aside, in the summer of 2008, due to the wildly overheated RE market. Second best was the risk being fed into the system by derivatives. The default “money market” account at the brokerage was packed with derivatives, so I switched to an FDIC insured alternative. A year later, that derivative filled “money market” account imploded and “broke the buck”.

Steve

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Could it be because there are no Norman Rockwell paintings of multi-billionaire corporate farmer welfare queens?

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Oh, Alpha, that is a perfect request to put to an AI painter!

We could make it the METAR logo….

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I’m a retired horticulturist (B.S., M.S. and dabbled in a PhD program) and have spent 50 years in that world. We’re talking f o o d here folks, and feeding 330+ million people (and beyond), so there better be a safety net somehow for producers. Think the vagarities of weather totally affecting outcomes, and with global warming taking hold, it’s going to get worse. Has your livelihood ever depended on getting the best environmental conditions to make a buck, or somehow avoiding the worst that nature can offer? Try it sometime. Corporate farming sucks, but here we are 2025. Reagan started the increase in corporate farming, and no surprise, things have gone off the rails. Our food system is a mess, dependent on a very few small regions, especially CA, and then trucked or flown around the country and world. Not to mention we now have depleted soils, diminished water resources, pesticide dependence, emerging new pests and diseases, hotter temperatures, more and more people to feed, etc. And none of it is getting better, including the politics of agriculture. Family farms and local producers should be supported by local consumers, people should care, but ‘America’ doesn’t really give a flip about any of it. Too affected by social media, I suppose. Have a good day! :confused:
conifer

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Corporate WELFARE farming.

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Bingo bingo bingo.

Resilience and reasonably local production is necessary for long term survival, and current policies are stacked mostly against that.

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Not sure how practical that is given our population. I suppose it depends upon one’s definition of “reasonably local”. Without external resources, the LA basin could probably support about 100,000 people. With 100x that it is necessary to import food, water, energy.

DB2

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