Farm Bill: Just One Giant Cotton Farm's Subsidies...
If this doesn't fire you up for farm bill reform I don't know what will.
From the must-read story in today's NYT by Marian Burros:
According to the subsidy data from the Environmental Working Group, one giant cotton farm collected $2.95 million through crop subsidies in 2005, nearly as much money as the federal government spent on its primary research program for organic agriculture last year — $3 million.
That would be the top farm on this list, by the way.
I credit the Organic Farming Research Foundation's policy honcho, Mark Lipson, the top expert on organic farming research in the country, for a breakdown on research funding that inspired this little compare and contrast. The $3 million program in question is the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI) authorized in the 2002 Farm Bill, which OFRF describes as "the only program dedicated to the specific scientific and outreach needs of organic agriculture."
Bad enough that we spent a measly three-mil on this important program in FY '06 (it is authorized at $5 mil/year but we got gypped by appropriators, as usual).
Worse that a single cotton farm got that much in subsidies in just one year.
Let's fix that, shall we?
Comments
The Government should be helping the small farmer more. I am talking about SMALL farms, like 100 or 200 acres and not more. As it is here in georgia most of these subsidies that I see in the database show farmers with larger acreage getting the subsidies, at least around my area.
Seems to me that subsidizing the smaller farmers will help increase the number of small farms-less than 200 acres- which are disappearing.
Posted by: TC | July 8, 2007 4:07 PM