SUBSIDY NONSENSE
I'm in western Oklahoma on a farm consult and learning about farm subsidies. I know they now call it crop insurance, but let me tell you what I've learned out here in cotton country. Traveling to different parts of the world give you a visceral perspective of things that you can't get when you just read about them.
I'm certainly a fan of reading, but your perspective takes on a new understanding when you actually see what you read about from thousands of miles away. It's similar to USAID, which has come under fire from Elon Musk and the Trump clearing-house team. For decades, as I've traveled the world, the one U.S. agency receiving the greatest vitriol from other nations is USAID. The damage this program has done, culturally, environmentally, agriculturally is almost unspeakable.
For years I've said if I could eliminate one agency, it would be USAID. When you get on the ground in a place where it has devastated the society and ecology and where the people scorn Americans as a result, you become embarrassed to say you're from the U.S. When you're surrounded, in a locale, with people railing on the U.S. for our arrogance and hurtfulness, it's far more real than just seeing it on the news.
So here I am in western Oklahoma where after two good years of rain they're enduring a fall drought. The irrigated cotton crop was destroyed by weather anomalies like wind and hail, which is fairly usual. This is prairie; cotton isn't welcome here ecologically. But because of crop insurance, farmers continue to grow it to receive the government check.
As if that's not bad enough, here's the kicker. The rules of the crop insurance program require irrigation application, from precious and dwindling underground aquifers, in order to receive compensation. Even though the cotton was destroyed, farmers had to continue irrigating in order to receive the check. In other words, farmers are required to pump water onto cropless acres to do their part in salvaging it, even if there isn't anything growing. This is insane on every level: economics, ecology, energy, labor.
The six crops in the crop insurance (subsidy) program are cotton, sugar cane, rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans. Those are the six picked winners in the farm commodity program. The rules are highly regimented, administered from Washington, without regard to what is actually beneficial or appropriate. As a result, farmers continue to grow cotton in a hostile environment, destroying the land and water, when any reasonable person would shift and do something different. The farm programs push agriculture into madness.
We drove by an operation where Farm Service Agency (another USDA program) paid a massive grant to a young farmer to get started. He bought cows and cobbled together a couple thousand acres of land and it's the most despicable set-up you can imagine. But he's got easy money, thanks to a farm program and the American taxpayer, and is as uncreative, filthy, wasteful, and conventional as it gets. Thousands and thousands of acres here, like everywhere, have been turned into wasteland due to farm subsidy programs and farmers who don't need to run a business like a business.
It breaks your heart to see the square miles of destroyed prairie turned to compacted soil and briars. This deserted and destroyed land could be verdant prairie, producing abundance and hydrating the aquifers. This is why North America today produces less food than it did 500 years ago. Shame on us.
Like the 1979 Food Pyramid that launched a generation of sickness, we would have a far more productive agriculture and better land stewardship had well-meaning but addle-headed meddling President Lincoln never germinated the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Had the government never told us what to eat with dietary laws, we'd be much healthier. Had the government never told us how to farm, we'd have much better agriculture.
Do you think there's anything worth preserving at the USDA?