America’s agriculture policies were written by corporate lobbyists who couldn’t run a watermelon stand.
South Dakota Farm Corn Harvest - Carl Young, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
By Jim Hightower
A farmer was asked what he’d do if he won a million-dollar lottery. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d just keep farming ‘til the money runs out.”
Trying to make a living as a farmer is not for the fainthearted. You have to take out high-interest loans from cold-eyed bankers to put in a crop and buy supplies. Then you’re also at the mercy of everything from bugs to monopolistic middlemen. And here’s a cruel twist: If you defy the odds and produce a great crop, you lose money!
This is happening right now. With unusually-good weather this year, corn and soybean harvests are expected to set records. But this abundance creates a market glut, allowing middlemen to knock down prices paid to farmers. A bushel of Illinois corn, for example, costs farmers $4.30 to produce, but they’re only getting $3.70 for it.
Meanwhile, the cost of such basics as seed, fertilizer, and tractors are skyrocketing. High costs coupled with low crop prices means that farmers’ income is expected to drop by 25 percent this year.
You might call this good crop-bad price phenomenon “ironic.” But it’s deliberate – an inevitable product of America’s perverse agricultural policy that pushes farmers to over produce in order to keep commodity prices low for giant processors and retailers. Little known fact: Our national “farm policy” is not written by farmers but by corporate lobbyists, lawyers, and economists – people who couldn’t run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the highway patrol flag down the customers for them.
That has got to change. To join an effort to demand a farm bill written by and for farmers, consumers, workers, and our environment, go to: FarmAid.org/Take-Action.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org
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