From The Hill:
Brooke Rollins, our new secretary of Agriculture, is promising to reform the department and create “effective and efficient nutrition programs.” On her first day she “pledged to bring greater efficiency to USDA” and “stop wasteful spending.”
If she’s serious about eliminating waste, she’ll take a hard look at the wasteful mandates and billions of U.S. tax dollars that go directly to agricultural corporations every year.
What do we get for this huge investment of public funds? Mostly an industry that benefits a few large corporations and perpetuates a cycle of overproduction and waste. Wasteful mandates and spending actually add additional costs to Americans on top of our tax dollars, including billions in increased food, fuel, and medical costs, and environmental harm.
Rollins has a big opportunity for change.
Despite spending $20 billion a year of our tax dollars on farm subsidies, Americans never see most U.S. agriculture products. We only eat about 37 percent of major crops produced. The remainder are feeding the pockets of large agriculture corporations — diverted to industrial processes that overproduce fuel and feed or exported out of the country and entangled in tariff battles.
Take the biofuel industry: Congress subsidizes biofuels through the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires all fuel refiners to include billions of gallons of corn and soy-based biofuels in gasoline and diesel — far more than what the market demands ... What biofuel subsidies have done is increase consumer costs. In a recent report, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the Renewable Fuel Standard increases our food and fuel costs by over $8 billion per year.
. . .
Agricultural subsidies have ballooned out of control largely because of the myth of the bucolic family farm. No one wants to hurt the hard-working, multi-generational small farmer who is just trying to earn an honest living.
But this isn’t the reality of American agriculture today. Our agriculture industry is dominated by a small number of industrial-scale corporations that benefit from the vast majority of subsidies.
There's more at the link.
I could get behind this in a big way. Just for a start, how about abolishing the ethanol mandate for gasoline? By eliminating it, we'd save literally billions of dollars a year buying a product that is not scientifically or economically necessary - in fact, using it and blending it with "raw" fuels costs us quite a bit more per gallon than we'd otherwise have to pay. And guess what? All that ethanol subsidy money goes to "Big Ag" - firms like Archer Daniels Midland and their ilk, corporate "farmers" that own thousands of square miles of American farmland and exploit it for their benefit, not ours.
I hope a way can be found to help small farmers, whether families or small corporations like LLC's, to stay on the land and get access to the latest technology. That way, not only can they grow the food we need, but they can provide employment for themselves and many others. That will also breathe new life into otherwise dying small towns and farm communities.
There's a place for "Big Ag", I'm sure . . . but not at taxpayers' expense. Let them fund their own operations.
Peter
19 comments:
Just getting the Government out of the way would be a major blessing.
But, but, but WHO would PROTECT US from bad food..
LOOKING AROUND at the health destroying food crap and food recalls almost daily...
Who's Protecting us NOW??
Well, as a small farmer, if I see my animals into the system I get 15 cents or less of the dollar you pay for meat. More people are developing digestive and health issues due to assaults on their immune systems (another issue for RFKjr) but many people would benefit from grass fed meat. No grain finishing. I feed my family and I sell to friends at a steep discount to what they will get in the store.
Then there is the energy expenditure. Cow goes to sale barn, goes to feed lot, gets 3-6 months of corn, corn and corn trucked in from somewhere. Then taken to large processing factory, turned into steaks and trucked many miles to the store. Grass finished beef tastes different, to me it has more taste.
The food pyramid is inverted, so we need to eat much more meat. We have neither serums like the gorilla nor rumens to help us digest vegetable matter. We get 1/3 of the nutrients from a humble carrot. On the other hand, we absorb almost 100% of nutrients from beef. This research has been around but suppressed. Don't believe me; do your own research, but look seriously at no grains, no sugars. My inflammation is way down.
Back to it. There are lots of local farmers. I know people that can't imagine not having cows. The problem is these same people are getting older and they are having to give up their animals. Younger kids don't see it as being worth the effort. A feeder calf goes for maybe $200. I get $125 to $150 for a ram. I can take a six month old calf, have him processed, and get meat for half the price at the store. It gets better the older the animal gets.
Then you have to consider labor and taxes. Cows are low maintenance compared to sheep, but fences need to be fixed, water made available during freezing temperatures (break the ice), minerals made available, etc. Oh, pay taxes on the land. West of the Mississippi there is too much rain, it tends to wash out the calcium needed for high protien grasses. This biases the ecosystem towards high cellulose trees. Pasture maintenance. Many farmers also follow monoculture format where they either raise plants or animals, but not both. The ecosystem is imbalanced by that as well. Read - A Bold Return to Giving a Damn. He makes the point better than I.
So here I am, trying to follow traditional farming with chickens, cows, sheep, and goats following rotational grazing to help heal my pastures. I'm called a hippy farmer because I'm trying to mimic the natural cycle as best I can. Rotational grazing has been around and studied extensively since the 1960's. The problem for large scale producers is they will lose money for 2-4 years if they shift production models. Our current monoculture setup is very deeply ingrained. I'm basically retired and my farm is my hobby, not my income. I'm free to raise hippies.
This is barely scratching the surface. Want to make a difference? Find a local processor/butcher shop providing meat from local animals. Better yet, find a farm where you approve of the way they raise their animals. My pastures are not green lawns, but they have weeds due to the fact that there are no herbicides other than goats. Try lamb and goat. For lamb, get hair sheep, not wool sheep. The stuff in Costco or Sam's Club, probably wool sheep from New Zealand or Australia. Some of my friends that enjoy my meat couldn't even eat the stuff they bought from Costco. All meat is not the same.
Sorry for the rant, but you can't talk small farmers without getting into the current food/agricultural complex and how it is built on foods that keep you sick. And there are studies! There is science. As they say, You don't have to believe me, do your own research. But if you trust what the gov't is telling you at this point, you deserve what you get. Worse comes to worse, find someone who has made the change in lifestyle and find out how it works for them. See also Vinny Tortorino, America's Angriest Trainer and Dr. Eric Westman, Soil Fertility & Animal Health (The Albrecht Papers, Vol II ) by William A. Albrecht , Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes
I grew up on a family farm and these issues were prevalent even back in those ancient times. One of the big reasons I got out was because it was obvious there was no future in it.
Back then, a combine cost $100k, a decent sized tractor $25k. Plus planters and plows and disks and cultivators and sprayers and wagons...
That was when the median household income was $23k a year and interest rates were in the double digits.
You basically needed the same equipment to farm 20 acres as you did to farm 200, but with a lot less income potential.
It's even worse now with all the automation, the big ag companies can probably farm 500 acres with the same equipment needed to farm 20 acres.
Basically, our farming was a hobby, we didn't make any money at it as a family. Dad worked in a factory and Mom was a school teacher. That's what paid the bills.
The farm barely paid for itself. Some years it didn't. I knew even back then there was no future in small farms. You had to have the potential to buy more and more land to compete with the corporate behemoths, or it was basically just going to always be a hobby.
All the small farmers I know of these days, don't even try to grow food crops. They grow 20 or 40 or 100 acres of hay. Less equipment needed, don't have to buy seed every year. And most of them still barely break even every year. They either have a "real" job that pays the bills, or have some other income source like a spouse's income or investments.
The biggest advantage of having a small farm is that you can raise a lot of your own food, even if you don't grow food to sell.
Growing up We had a small orchard (2 each of apple, pear and cherry trees) a grape arbor. A strawberry patch. We had honey bees, a garden that took up almost an acre, and a barnlot with chickens, ducks, geese, sheep and a couple of cows...oh...and a pair of peacocks just because Dad liked them.
We went to the grocery store in town about once a month to buy coffee, sugar, spices, paper goods, toiletries, things like that. Pretty much everything else we needed we raised or made ourselves.
It's a great way to grow up and to live...but you're not going to make a living at it.
Anyway....memory lane rambling. Sorry about that.
Get the ethanol out of the gasoline? I'm afraid to dream that far!
Among the first things they should go after are the stupid dietary guidelines - My Plate or whatever they're calling it today.
There has never been the kind of "everyone agrees this is healthy" stuff they push, and the advisory board that sets them up is as corrupt as USAID. Every single person on that board has ties to industry ("Big Ag" to use the cliche') and some of them have many. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition just did a report on the systematic reviews of the current guidelines (2020-2025) and said they're “critically low quality.”
And that's where the exploding rates of diabetes come from - along with a bunch of other health problems.
If it won't fit on a fork, stop growing it, and stop subsidizing anything and everything agricultural with tax dollars - zero tax dollars to agriculture. If it's not profitable at its base it won't be produced, and that starts with contaminating petroleum with methanol.
Will the cost of some agricultural products go up? Certainly. But overall, the reduction in total expense will be beneficial; I'll gladly pay cents more per pound for something if it means multi-dollar savings on taxes.
Instead of dropping the $$ to the corporations, would be better used by directing it to the local Farm Service centers that actually have an interest in their local farming community.
I hope that Trump's people all have good security.,
Not a farmer, but it seems one big help to family farms would be to abolish the inheritance tax on farms, and make it illegal to require farmers to purchase new seed every year instead of saving from this year's product to grow next year.
To each his own.
No one we know will choke down grass fed beef or bison. We raise cattle. The hoity toity restaurants up by cheyenne that proudly raise grass fed bison do not get many repeat customers.
Yes, get rid of subsidies to the ethanol scam and mega corporate suck holes.
$20 billion in ag subsidies comes out to about $60 per American.
What that means is up to you.
How about cutting down the BIG BUYERS of ag products? Used to watch grain prices go way down just before harvest season, then go back up again after the season's crop was sold. Sure, the bulk would make the price drop some, but not by the amount that was the usual. Funny thing, once Big Farms started having enough grain storage on the farm itself to take advantage of the prices going back up the price fluctuations stopped being so large. Haven't watched for a while, so I don't know if this still holds true today.
questions:
does ethanol boost thee octane rating of gasoline? yes
can ethanol be a very cheap octane booster if the government gets its paws off it? yes
does ethanol when added to gasoline produce CO2? yes and there goes the all the arguments of the geniuses who think CO2 ia a poisonous gas
is ethanol a polar solvent that may destroy seals and tubing? yes
is ethanol highly hydophilic? yes and it will create rust on a number of sensitive surfaces in an auto engine
too many other pros & cons to list
Start by moving the entire Department of Agriculture in DC to Kansas. Half of the people will quit. Maybe 3/4s.
There was a butcher shop I used to shop at, you could get grass fed beef or grain finished beef, tried them both.
The grass fed was less money but we preferred the grain fed beef.. it was just better.
In my RV pure gas got 2 mpg better mileage than ethanol gas (10 vs 8 mpg).
Wow, you're almost a unicorn. Glad you're out there doing the right thing. You're probably nowhere near, but I would be willing to drive half a day-ish to buy from you. I'm a bit west of Nashville.
Currently I'm buying whole milk from the Mennonites Mk.2 (elec. and cars OK) from the neighboring county, where are you?
Why you hating on Kansas?
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