Less sympathy now as farming is increasingly industrial but if your options are:
A) grow a crop and risk not getting paid anything if it comes out poorly
B) grow corn and get a nearly-guaranteed payout
B seems to be the safe bet. I don’t think blaming people on choosing B is the move. I know I wouldn’t voluntarily choose A if my livelihood depended on it.
Part of the background is that the government wants to keep farmers “on hand” even when demand isn’t there, for national security reasons.
Essentially they want to be able to get more crops out of all farmers in a bad year, rather than rely on only a fewer number of farmers in a good year.
There are many greed/corruption/waste issues with this system, but all nations have a strong interest in keeping their breadbasket staffed up for hypothetical bad times
Yup, it’s a subsidy that I think generally makes sense, except I don’t think the plan was for everyone to pour so much resources into corn.
Probably around the point we got to: “can we use mashed up corn as fuel and plastic” is when we should’ve tried incentivizing a greater diversity of crops 😅
I grew up on a tobacco farm, when it’s sells it sells like an auction. If no one buys your crop, the government bought it for a set price and threw it in a warehouse in case we “ran out” of tobacco between harvests and companies wanted to buy more or some shit
But that’s not even really a subsidy, so I’m not sure why you’re talking about it.
The US government subsidizes corn heavily.
Less sympathy now as farming is increasingly industrial but if your options are:
A) grow a crop and risk not getting paid anything if it comes out poorly
B) grow corn and get a nearly-guaranteed payout
B seems to be the safe bet. I don’t think blaming people on choosing B is the move. I know I wouldn’t voluntarily choose A if my livelihood depended on it.
Part of the background is that the government wants to keep farmers “on hand” even when demand isn’t there, for national security reasons.
Essentially they want to be able to get more crops out of all farmers in a bad year, rather than rely on only a fewer number of farmers in a good year.
There are many greed/corruption/waste issues with this system, but all nations have a strong interest in keeping their breadbasket staffed up for hypothetical bad times
Yup, it’s a subsidy that I think generally makes sense, except I don’t think the plan was for everyone to pour so much resources into corn.
Probably around the point we got to: “can we use mashed up corn as fuel and plastic” is when we should’ve tried incentivizing a greater diversity of crops 😅
I’ve heard the fuel and plastic thing is again a subsidized endpoint for corn to keep the conveyor belt flowing.
There’s more than just corn like that
I grew up on a tobacco farm, when it’s sells it sells like an auction. If no one buys your crop, the government bought it for a set price and threw it in a warehouse in case we “ran out” of tobacco between harvests and companies wanted to buy more or some shit
But that’s not even really a subsidy, so I’m not sure why you’re talking about it.
I would say that a government guaranteed price floor would count as a subsidy, especially on a luxury/vice product like tobacco.