Mr. Cook

It looks like you are going to need to educate the media on what is right and wrong once more. Now that farm commodity prices are climbing and farm support payments for 2008 appear to be headed for an all-time low, the focus has moved to food prices that are just spiraling out of control because of the greedy farmers. Nevermind that there is about a dime's worth of corn in a $4.00 bag of corn chips, that's not "newsworthy". It's even got me confused. It's the farmer's fault for collecting support payments when prices are depressed and it's the farmer's fault when food prices are too high. I'm not sure how the farmer can ever be on the correct side of the argument. Perhaps we should just outsource all our food and fiber needs to the foreign countries. Yeah, that's the answer. It certainly worked for oil production, didn't it? And by the way, that's a neat ad by Oxfam. Did that third grader think it up all by themselves? Talk about a broad brush.....give me a break.

Of course, Congress has an easy way of protecting itself from such blistering ridicule. It could choose to stop paying direct farm subsidies to millionaires.

The small farmer is the one that needs help. The big conglomerates that have tens of thousands of acres more or less control market prices for farms products anyway. Help the little guy. The big guy can fend for himself.

Why do we not get the information on abuse of federal money to rich farmers on National news as Glen Beck, Anderson Cooper, Bill O'Reilly, etc.

Shirley,

We have had some success with the national television media on this issue. For example, here's a clip from Anderson Cooper's 360.

http://www.ewg.org/node/22291

No luck with Mr. O'Reilly yet, but we're trying.

You don't hear about farm policy in the television media because it is not a story. You can make statistics look however you want them to look. Find any government program that is foolproof and above reproach and it will be the first one I've ever heard of. Nobody would argue that United States farm policy is perfect, it certainly is not. However, when compared with programs in other countries, the level of support in the US pales in comparison. Farm support payments help keep an affordable food and fiber supply for our nation's population. Mr. Cook and his cronies point out the very isolated and extreme cases of payments that are still within the bounds of the government's policy to try and curry favor with the masses. However, what he would really like to see is all farm payments to be abolished and money used for conservation practices. He would like to see farming as we know it in America be outsourced to foreign countries. Boy, that really has paid off for the energies, hasn't it? The truth is that you and I as taxpayers pay less that 50 cents per day for a very stable and inexpensive food and fiber supply. Go and examine what Americans spend on food and fiber with countries such as Germany, France, or Japan. With commodity prices on the rise now, farm support payments are virtually nil. Next year's payments on all row crops will be less than 7% of total revenue for farmers in the US. You can't cherrypick which farmers should receive payments and which ones should not. Do you favor cutting off social security payments to those that have made X dollars in their working lifetime? Is that fair? For every statistic that the EWG and Oxfam and the like can produce to tell you why we should end our current farm policy, I can give you two for maintaining it.

I'm not a farmer, but I have many neighbors who are and I am wondering what the income tax implications of receiving a farm subsidy are? Does receipt of a farm subsidy mean no net federal income taxes?

Dan Akers
Hartsville, SC