Posted on 06/21/2013 6:09:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Well, THAT ought to throw everyone in a tizzy.
Who’da thought anyone but Monsanto cared about good and plentiful food production?
Careful, if you understand the tiniest bit of what Monsanto does, idiot Luddites will accuse you of working for them.
Just end the mandate and let the market set the price. Toss in all those goofy subsidies and watch food prices tumble. I mean wouldn’t it do the GOP good to say to the little guy, “we helped reduce your food prices”?
The other dirty secret is that the “family farm” is gone. It’s all big business, even organics. That’s why they need to tie it to food stamps. Without it you can’t get the Dems to vote to give even more subsidies to big business. They need a cover story.
I wasn’t voting for ADM’s tax breaks and special subsidies, I was voting for the urban poor!
No it is not. I know several farmers who own and farm their family farms. Of course they probably will not be able to pass it on to the next generation. The inheritance taxes will force the sale of the farm and equipment.
OK, I stand corrected by gross sales. It looks pretty stable, but subsistence level for a very long time:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/dataFiles/Farm_Household_Income/table04.xls
About 75% have gross sales below $50K a year. It’s curious that they’d break out the income and not the gross acreage. Only 2% of “farms” generate more than $1 million in gross sales annually.
So that’s really quite misleading. I suspect the Ag Dept. benefits from the veneer of “family farming”.
All the farmers I know, that I consider “family farms” are pretty small and very poor. Given that the number has been flat since 1996, farming, family farming, is just getting worse and worse as an occupation.
Now if you are talking about wheat, corn and soybeans then you are mostly right. Unless they are growing for a seed company most small farms don't bother. They raise things that have a higher return.
But there are still small and medium sized farms that are family owned. Although in some cases they are like one family I know that owns a very successful small business that they started to bring in a little extra cash for the farm. The business has far outstripped the farm in income but they still own the farm and one of the daughters and her husband took it over.
I am in IL. I don’t know a farmer without a side business or a wife with a job/healthcare in town. You saw the stats, no?
There are only 43K farms with gross, not net, but gross income of $1 million or above. The majority of farmers, the vast majority are just scraping by. It’s always been a tough business.
Corporate farming or niche farming is the only way to turn a reasonable profit given all the work and risk. My point is that farm subsidies benefit the 1100 or so corporate farmers. The numbers are broken out to hide that.
Accurate. Most family farms barely break even.
How did monsato pollute the farmers field?
Excellent: Senate introduces a bill to abolish RFS biofuels mandate
It's a START!
I own property in a farming county in Iowa.
300,000 acres, 700 farms.
Not even a half-dozen collect more than token amounts for wildlife and runoff acres.
Quite a few more have crop insurance, but I’m not sure the farm bill kicks in much for that, I believe it’s mostly self-supporting.
That said, the land is worth $5k-$10k per acre, and farmers make at least $300-$400 per acre.
Somewhere around 90% of American grown food comes from family farms.
Not that you'd recognize then as 'family' anymore, since the IRS has forced them to contort themselves into all sorts of odd corporate looking organizations, but they're still run by farm families.
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