From the Washington Post:
Today, most of the nation's food is produced by modern family farms that are large operations using state-of-the-art computers, marketing consultants and technologies that cut labor, time and costs. The owners are frequently college graduates who are as comfortable with a spreadsheet as with a tractor. They cover more acres and produce more crops with fewer workers than ever before.
The very policies touted by Congress as a way to save small family farms are instead helping to accelerate their demise, economists, analysts and farmers say. That's because owners of large farms receive the largest share of government subsidies. They often use the money to acquire more land, pushing aside small and medium-size farms as well as young farmers starting out.
"Historically, when you think of family farms, you think of mom and dad and three generations working a small or mid-sized farm. It gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling," said Alex White, a professor of agricultural economics at Virginia Tech. "In the real world, it might be a mid-sized farm. But it also might be a huge farm. It might be a corporation."
Large family farms, defined as those with revenue of more than $250,000, account for nearly 60 percent of all agricultural production but just 7 percent of all farms. They receive more than 54 percent of government subsidies. And their share of federal payments is growing -- more than doubling over the past decade for the biggest farms.
Oddly enough, the government seems to reward large farms rather than struggling farmers. The Post tells a story of an Illinois farmer who grossed $500,000 in soybean production and received $120,000 in subsidy checks from the government, which he called "embarrassing." A small farmer in Iowa with one-third the land received a far lower subsidy check. The decline in the number of family farms, when weighed against subsidy payments, is a result of large farms purchasing larger tracts of land as subsidies are reinvested. Small farms simply cannot compete in the market because of government subsidies.
The farm subsidy programs have seriously hurt the agricultural and land markets and ends up undermining the very people it claims to help. Perhaps we should reconsider the government's involvement in agriculture and allow the market to work on its own.
UPDATE: South Dakota Magazine has more.
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