Many are critical of the blind and those with disabilities because of the
so-called burden on the federal taxpayer through disability payments. The
article below describes how about half of all farmers in the United
States are also receiving financial support from the federal
taxpayer. However, we do not hear complaints about this financial
benefit.
kelly
The New York Times
December 24, 2000
Failing Farmers Learn to Profit From Federal Aid
By TIMOTHY EGAN
FORT BENTON, Mont. For somebody who works the hard northern land
that was first cut by homesteaders' plows less than a century ago,
the big harvest of government checks usually happens in the fall
$40,000 for just being a farmer, another $40,000 for emergencies
like bad market conditions, more than $100,000 for not making any
money on what is grown, and $50,000 for taking other land out of
production.
Good crops or bad, high yields or low it hardly matters, the checks
roll in from the federal government, the biggest payroll in farm
country. By the end of the year, some farmers can receive up to
$280,000 simply by having another miserable year of failure.
Perhaps never in the history of a nation founded by agrarian self-
starters has the federal government propped up rural America to
such a degree. This year, the government distributed a record $28
billion in direct payments, accounting for half of all the money
made by farmers. In eight states, including Montana, government
assistance made up 100 percent of overall farm income.
What these institutionalized bailouts have done, say many farmers
who curse the government but take the checks, is strengthen a
culture of dependency in a large part of the United States that
consistently votes Republican and touts its feisty independence
from Washington.
This dependency has only become more entrenched in the four years
since Congress passed a farm bill that was supposed to wean food
producers off government aid. Direct payments to farmers have
tripled since 1996, and food producers who had never taken a
significant piece of the aid pie are now getting big chunks of it,
from apple farmers in Washington State to rice farmers in
California.
"All that farm bill has done is opened the door for people to get
bigger and bigger payments from the government," said Mike O'Hara,
a wheat farmer whose grandfather homesteaded the Montana prairie
just north of this little county seat and who relies on federal
subsidies for his farm income. "It's been an absolute disaster."
The funnel of money from the capital to the heartland has created
an unusual welfare state in places like Chouteau County, an expanse
of slumbering winter wheat on the Montana high plains that slope to
the Missouri River. This is one of the premier grain-producing
areas in the world. But it is also essentially a ward of the
federal government, a slow-fading county of barely 5,000 people
that received $51 million in direct assistance this year. Only
three farmers in all of Chouteau County do not receive government
payouts, according to the Agriculture Department.
"At one time we were fairly independent, but through no fault of
our own have become as dependent as anyone in American society on
government assistance and it's deeply troubling," said Bruce
Nelson, a third-generation Montana grain farmer, who just stepped
down as head of the Farm Service Agency, which distributes
government checks in Montana.
Despite the extraordinary reliance on government payments, these
areas are still losing people, jobs and farms, all the things these
payments were intended to support. Farmer dependence on federal
money is even higher now, in both percentage terms and real
dollars, than it was at the depth of the Great Depression.
The departing agriculture secretary, Dan Glickman, says farming has
"become largely an income transfer program," with the government
underwriting rural businesses and requiring very little in return.
Farmers throughout this state, who seem genuinely torn by the
disconnect between their ingrained philosophy of independence and
their reliance on federal money to make a living, echoed his
conclusion in numerous interviews.
There seems to be a gradual realization in farm country that
federal subsidies in the United States like those in much of Europe
are not so much about food supply anymore as they are about keeping
the least- populated parts of the country afloat. So while he
criticizes the size of some of the handouts, Mr. Glickman says that
without the government, thousands of farmers and the businesses
that depend on them would go bankrupt within a year or two.
The money keeps banks, schools, hospitals and small businesses
afloat in counties that are one step short of the grave. But it
also provides better than average incomes for farmers who have
learned to take advantage of all the federal programs.
Over the last four years, the top 1 percent of farmers in this
county about 15 farmers received an average of $616,000 each from
the government. The top 10 percent about 150 farmers were paid an
average of $308,000 per farmer over the last four years. These
numbers do not include the record payout for the year 2000.
"It has created some huge dependencies, no doubt about it," said
Wiley Good, a Chouteau County grain farmer and businessman. "It's
easy to say, All this cash is out there, now what can I do to farm
the government."
Mr. Good lives a comfortable life in a big house, travels to Europe
on long vacations, and partakes of the various government programs
for most of his farm income. He shrugs at the fact that the free
enterprise system has virtually disappeared from the farm economy
of Montana, the nation's No. 2 farm state by amount of acreage.
"It'd be nice to go to the local grain elevator and sell your stuff
for a price close to what it cost you to produce it," Mr. Good
said. "But it's just not in the cards."
Though the aid programs go against their market-oriented
philosophy, Republicans have been reluctant to criticize the
swelling farm aid programs because a majority of the money has been
sent to states that traditionally send Republicans to Congress. The
farm aid map is less favorable for Democrats. But a handful of
crucial swing states that Democrats count on in major election
years Iowa, Missouri and Illinois among them are also among the
biggest farm bailout recipients.
Many farmers are going broke or barely getting by. And drought
conditions over the last few years have made bad positions
precarious in states from Texas to the northern Plains. The average
government payout for this county this year is $36,000 and the
growers say that money barely covers the crop production costs,
like fuel, machinery, seed, labor and loan payments.
Nationwide, 1.6 million farmers received an average of more than
$13,000 each last year in government money. After Congress raised
the cap on one of the bigger farm subsidy programs this year, an
individual farmer can get more than $280,000 a year from various
payments.
"Virtually every farmer in the country is on the dole in one form
or the other," said Clark Williams-Derry, a senior analyst with the
Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization that
has studied farm subsidies.
"It's social engineering with nobody at the switch," Mr. Williams-
Derry said.
Even as the amount of money paid to farm counties has soared,
restrictions on who can get those funds and how they are supposed
to be used do not form a consistent policy, Mr. Glickman said.
"Essentially, the government's role in requiring the farmer to do
something in return has been largely eliminated by Congress," Mr.
Glickman said.
He added, "It's important enough for this country to keep rural
communities going. And while I don't like the large payments going
to some farmers that's an outright embarrassment many of these
payments are keeping large sections of rural America from folding
up and going down."
What has happened in rural counties like Chouteau completes a full
circle, from the creation of farms by government incentive through
the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 to a period of prosperity and
independence in the 1950's and 60's, to the present where
government is the only thing keeping people on the old bison
grounds of half of Montana.
The homesteads have become sources of export crops. Nearly 90
percent of the wheat grown in Montana is sent overseas. But it
faces global competition and a glut. Even countries like Pakistan,
once seen as a relief target, are now exporting grain. If the
Montana growers were to try and get by in the free market, they
would lose about $2 on every bushel of wheat they grow.
Farm policy, in part, has been an effort to eliminate subsidized
farmers, providing them with relief as they get into something more
profitable. But as Congress has been raising the amount of money
paid to failing farmers, many of them are making good profits.
"The general outlook for many of these farms is not good," said
Bill Evans, the government's chief liaison in this county. "But
they have become dependent on our office, and we don't want that."
Agriculture policy makers say the aid programs have become so big
and are often at cross-purposes, that it is unclear exactly what
taxpayers are getting for the $28 billion sent to rural counties
this year. Some of the biggest payouts, like money given to farmers
who agree not to grow crops on a piece of ground for 10 years or
more, may actually be encouraging the dismantling of fragile rural
economies.
Roger Axtman, the last farm implements dealer left in Chouteau
County, says his family-run, three- generation-old business is
slowly going broke even as the millions in farm aid courses through
his county.
"We're taking very good ground out of production and paying people
to do it," Mr. Axtman said. "So where we used to have a hundred
regular clients, now we have sixty. And what do they do with the
money? Well, some of them buy the Winnebago and hit road. They
don't buy a new tractor from me."
Even as federal money to this county has reached record levels,
farm employment has continued to fall declining by 32 percent, more
than twice the rate of population decline, over the last 20 years.
But Mr. Axtman says that without the federal payments his business
would fold, and with it would go most of the human attachments to
Chouteau County, a place that calls itself "the birthplace of
Montana" because of its proximity to the ancient highway of the big
Missouri River.
"These farmers sit here and they tell me how much they hate taking
the cheese checks from the government," Mr. Axtman said. "They're
honest farm people, the majority of them, but they don't know what
else to do."
Other payouts, like the money from programs in which individual
farmers can receive up to $150,000 a year when commodity prices are
particularly low, are disproportionately weighted toward the bigger
operations, contributing to the loss of small family farms,
according to taxpayer groups that have done independent analyses of
farm programs.
But one thing that the people who grow the food and the people who
write the checks agree on is that if the government were to
suddenly disengage itself from its monumental entanglement with
rural America, upwards of half of the 1.6 million farmers in the
United States who now receive some form of federal assistance would
go out of business.
Montana, for example, ranks nearly last in average annual pay and
near the top in the percentage of people living below the poverty
level. If the $500 million annual government farm payroll were
taken out of the state, the Big Sky country could fall into bleak
times rivaling those of the Great Depression, some analysts say.
"So maybe it is time we had some intellectual honesty in farm
policy," Mr. Glickman said. "Nobody talked about this during the
presidential election. And you rarely hear it spoken in Congress.
But these farm payments have become truly rural support payments."
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
|
