The American Spectator

“How does a farmer double his income?”

“Get a second mailbox.”

I was first told this joke 17 years ago by a friend who was both a farmer and a director of a state agricultural agency. It still resonates with me, today, as we witness another harvest season, not in the fertile fields across America but here in Washington, D.C.

Yes, it is the season for another Farm Bill complete with its subsidies, supports, and Rube Goldberg programs which will be layered on top of other tariffs, preferences, and perks to assist the agricultural sector in the face of what some health officials call an obesity epidemic.

This periodic spectacle of rent-seeking and the fleecing of taxpayers represent the triumph of the Jeffersonian myth of the yeoman family farmer over principles of limited government, a very ironic development. Most farmers express nothing but disdain for the federal government’s taxes and regulations of all kinds. Their self-image is that of an independent, self-sufficient citizen who feeds the nation and the world. Indeed, most of the farmers and ranchers I have had the pleasure of working with are hard-working, family-oriented Republicans.

This is a monumental case of collective cognitive dissonance given that the American farming “way of life” is dependent on federal taxpayers who are not fortunate enough to have picked farming as their chosen profession.

All this federal money creates obvious incentives for over-exploitation of natural resources. The ethanol boom is entirely a creation of the federal government. It will aggravate the environmental impacts of existing farm subsidy programs. Acres and acres of additional corn will be planted, accompanied by tons and tons of chemical application and inputs, including nutrients, which will aggravate the already ballooning hypoxic or “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention local rivers, lakes, and streams. The hypoxic zone is the result of oxygen depletion caused by over-enrichment of nutrients, primarily nitrogen, 90 percent of which comes from row-crop agriculture in the Mississippi River basin with an assist from the Ohio and Missouri Rivers.

In the west subsidized water for subsidized crops as well as subsidized, below-cost grazing and timbering on federal lands degrade watersheds throughout the region.

Most economists and ecologists who have looked at the plight of Florida’s Everglades place a great deal of the blame on U.S. tariffs imposed on imported sugar which, if lifted, would help the environment and the consumer by removing this incentive for unsustainable sugarcane farming in that part of the country.

There are millions of “conservation” dollars available in farm programs, many of which I support, such as the Wetlands Reserve and soil conservation programs. But it would be hard to argue that their environmental benefits come close to offsetting the harm that massive farm subsidies generate.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has struggled to mandate “targeting” of these precious conservation dollars on high-risk or high-value waters and landscapes, but this effort is resisted by the farm interests because they want to spread the money around to insure political support for the overall program in Congress. The Department of Agriculture’s state conservationist can encourage such targeting of resources if he or she wants to, but there is not much top-down pressure to do so.

There are, of course, equity issues regarding subsidies since they are not means-tested. In other words, rich and middle-class farmers get these federal payments. So a wealthy farmer is entitled to a federal subsidy, but a working-class auto mechanic is not. Does that sound fair to you?

It is pretty clear that unnecessary, protectionist farm subsidies and tariffs in the U.S., France, Switzerland, and other developed countries are a real blow to destitute, developing countries which are in dire need of access to markets, such as ours, in which their low-cost goods would benefit consumers.

APOLOGISTS FOR THE STATUS QUO make three arguments. First, everybody does it. Second, we have the votes in Congress. Third, all this federal largesse is necessary to protect the safest, healthiest food supply in the world. The reader can judge the first and second claims, possibly recalling the fundamental moral lessons your mother told you when you were young.

As to the third, the answer is quite simple. If you withdrew federal subsidies you would have fewer, more efficient, more productive farmers — not less food. The truth of this observation was brought home to me by recent news accounts of dairy and sheep farming in New Zealand and tobacco farming in the U.S.