Showing posts with label Farm programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Farm programs. Show all posts

Monday, February 06, 2023

New EWG Report on Distribution of Farm Payments

 Various newspapers picked up the EWG report.

The lede for one: "The top 10% of recipients of federal farm payments raked in more than 79% of total subsidies over the last 25 years ",  

Here's the EWG report.

Elsewhere they note that the Trump administration changed the reporting of payments--I think FSA must be reporting payments to assignees, so likely using the payee data, not the payable. 

[Update: they note the change in reporting reveals which financial institutions get the most payments: " Surprisingly, the financial institution that received the most farm subsidies was the USDA. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency, or FSA, alone got almost $350 million in farm subsidies between 2019 and 2021, more than any other financial organization." Not a surprise to anyone who understands how the payments word.]]

Friday, January 27, 2023

The Former Guy Gave to Growers

 Via John Phipps, who retweeted it.  I was trying to find his skeptical piece on vertical farming, but found this worth reading.

Over the years different administrations have stretched the authorities granted under the CCC act and Section 32.   

[Update: One chart from the piece:



Friday, August 19, 2022

Earl Butz Was Wrong (on Cover)

 When my first boss in ASCS sent me to NC for a month to get a taste what state and county offices did, and farmer fieldmen (as district directors were called then), I spent a week in Halifax county IIRC.  The CED was sharp. It was fall so operations were slower. One day he took me out into the field, perhaps doing a spot check, don't remember.  But we stopped at a sawmill.  It had a machine, a lathe perhaps, for shaving a thin layer of wood from a rotating log. Fascinating, as I'd never seen it before.  I think the wood shavings were cut into strips which were then woven into wooden baskets.

We weren't there to look at the operation, but to get one of the workers to sign up for cost-sharing under the then Agricultural Conservation Program.  What was the practice?  A cover crop.   (Cover crops were, I think, particularly popular in the South, where there had been a lot of erosion of worn-out cotton land.)

ACP was established in the New Deal, but by 1969 it was under attack.  Republicans, led by Secretary of Agriculture Butz, argued that some, or perhaps all of the practices, increased the productivity of farms, and, therefore the farmers could and should find the practices worthwhile enough to finance and install on their own, without the carrot of a government cost-share. They also argued that items such as liming were the result of lobbying by the industry. 

There was a lot of back and forth over the fate of ACP between the Nixon administration and Congress, where the House was controlled by Democrats throughout. In the end the program was cut back, both by reducing appropriations and by inflation, and the cover crop practice and liming were eliminated. 

IMO the Butz expectation that rational self-interest would be sufficient to perpetuate widespread cover crops was disproved by the results. 


Sunday, July 24, 2022

Liberals and Change

 


Within this thread is the "gentrification"/"white flight" cartoon attacking liberals--that is, if the neighborhood changes by increasing the proportion of whites--it's bad because "gentrification"; if it changes by decreasing the proportion of whites--it's bad because "white flight".

I think it's a fair point.  As a liberal I'm stuck, welcoming change from the "creative destruction" of capitalism/market economy, and opposing change by providing a "safety net". 

The key, I think, is modulated change: change must occur but change that's too fast, too massive needs to be cushioned.  That's my analysis and defense of farm programs--only a rigorous supply management system such as those we had for tobacco and peanuts has been halfway successful in maintaining successful farms. If we aren't willing to go that far, then the best farm programs can do is to cushion the changes. 

Saturday, June 04, 2022

Stanford Research on Farm Programs and Politics

 Here's a Stanford Phd candidate doing research on the relationship between participation in farm programs and political views.

Tuesday, November 02, 2021

The Nose of the Camel and Government Programs

 This Politico piece traces the history of the pension program for Civil War veterans (Union army) from very limited coverage to close to universal, ending with its last payment in 2020 to a widow. It argues that because the vets developed an effective lobby organization (Grand Army of the Republic) they were able to expand the program over the years.  It goes on to cite the 20th century's Social Security and Medicare programs as similar cases where a program limited initially was expanded subsequently. All of this is in service to an argument that possibly the programs included in Biden's "Build Back Better" might have a similar destiny.

I don't quarrel with the writer's logic and hope for the expansion of BBB programs.  I do offer the instance of USDA farm programs as another instance of the expansion of government programs, an instance which is even more noteworthy than his examples.

In the years since the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed, programs have expanded to cover not only seven or eight field crops, but oilseeds, fruits and vegetables, specialty crops, aquaculture, apiculture, etc.  The only crops whose programs have been reduced as of now are tobacco, peanuts, and naval stores.


Friday, September 24, 2021

What FSA Employees Have to Deal With

 I'm taking the liberty of doing a screenshot of a post in the Facebook FSA Employees group:



When you're serving many people in all parts of the country all year round, you run into unusual situations, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic.  County employees have to deal. 

(While I'm on FSA, I'd mention farmers.gov, which has developed over time. There's also some Youtube videos--I'd have a link which I found yesterday but am having problems with Chrome.  Here's a starting point.

Monday, September 13, 2021

"Worth" Movie and FSA Programs

 Saw some publicity for the movie "Worth", a dramatization of Kenneth Feinberg's management of the distribution of the funds for relatives of 9/11 victims. The title relates to the problem of determining "worth": do you assess worth based on economic losses or regard everyone as equal?  

We see the same conflict in public assessments of some FSA farm programs: do you issue payments based on economics: the amount of production, the acreage, the losses of production due to disaster OR do you regard all producers as equal.

Judging by recent stories on agricultural programs, many people believe that farm programs should treat each farmer equally.  But a third criterion is also raised--"deserving" which might include "need" and "reparations." Very few of those who aren't farmers are willing to support programs which compensate for economic losses, which means big farmers get more.

I'll be interested to see the movie.

Sunday, August 08, 2021

Disaster Programs

 During much of my time at ASCS/FSA the agriculture policy community was pushing the idea of moving from disaster payment programs to crop insurance, an effort which culminated in the 1996 farm bill, along with Sen. Pat Roberts' "Freedom to Farm".

Back on July 28 House Ag passed another bill deviating from that path.  As quoted by Illinois extension, Chris Clayton summarized: 

"“The bill, passed unanimously by voice vote, will expand coverage of losses under USDA’s Wildfire Hurricane Indemnity Program-Plus (WHIP-Plus) and cover losses including those from wildfires last year in California as well as the derecho that hit Midwestern producers last summer. The aid will also cover producer losses this year from the polar vortex as well as farmers whose crops are in D-2 ‘severe’ drought conditions for at least eight consecutive weeks.”

Friday, January 22, 2021

Burley Tobacco Growers Co-op

 Al Cross at the Rural Blog notes the Burley co-op is going out of business.  From the website:

  • A partial settlement has been reached that would result in dissolving the Co-op and paying between $2000 and $6000 each (estimated) to certain tobacco growers in Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, or Missouri that are members of a settlement class certified by the Court.
  • The settlement class is made up of those individuals or businesses that were a landowner, operator, landlord, tenant, or sharecropper growing burley tobacco in Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, or Missouri during at least one of the 2015–2020 crop years.
I don't know the story behind this--apparently there was a class-action suit claiming it didn't serve any purpose these days.

The co-op movement was strong in agriculture in the last century, both on the producer side and the supply side. The tobacco, peanut, and cotton co-ops were precursors and enablers of the New Deal farm programs.

[Updated:  Wendell Berry's brother on its history.]




Monday, December 14, 2020

Justice for Black Farmers-- A Systemic Problem

 One of my problems with the draft legislation S.4929, JBF, is it is piling new programs on old programs. (The text has been posted on Congress.gov.)

In a rational government Congress would evaluate the success or failure of existing rural development and farm loan programs, change the law where needed, and reorganize the bureaucracy. If current programs are successful we could add resources, if they have weaknesses we could reform them, if they're too bad we could kill them.  But such changes wouldn't convince the advocates that reforms were real  and therefore wouldn't reward the Congressional sponsors. So instead we get more programs, with somewhat different approaches, 

Bottom line: it makes life more difficult for the bureaucracy.

Monday, November 09, 2020

WTO Limits on Farm Subsidies

 I've wondered whether USDA would run into problems with the WTO's limits on farm program payments. A recent CRS report analyzed the problem.

The last paragraph of the summary says:

If the United States were to exceed its WTO annual spending limit, then offending farm programs (whether ad hoc or traditional) could be vulnerable to challenge by another WTO member under the WTO’s dispute settlement rules. However, if the payment programs that appear likely to cause the United States to exceed its WTO spending limits in 2019 and 2020 prove to be temporary, then a successful WTO challenge might not necessarily result in an adverse ruling against the United States or any other authorized retaliation (e.g., permission to rais e tariffs on U.S. products), depending on the outcome of a WTO dispute settlement proceeding. 

The issue is summarized as this:

The U.S. government provided up to $60.4 billion in ad hoc payments to agricultural producers cumulatively in 2018, 2019, and 2020, in addition to existing farm support. These payments have raised concerns among some U.S. trading partners, as well as market watchers and policymakers, that U.S. domestic farm subsidy outlays might exceed its annual WTO spending limit of $19.1 billion in one or more of those three years. [emphasis added]


I bolded the numbers because the last I'd heard it was $48 billion. I'm sure the $60 billion had little to do with the election results.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Saturday, August 15, 2020

The Strange Death of Europe

 I skimmed through this 2017 book  by Douglas Murray. It's interesting, because it's a very Euro-centric view of migration, but you see parallels and contrasts with the concerns in the US embodied in the Trump administration.  Some points which stuck out to me:

  • the decline of Christianity 
  • the loss of standards by which to judge (adversely) the Muslim immigrants 
  • European guilt over colonialism and German guilt over the Holocaust
  • governments were always behind the curve in reacting to increased flow of immigrants
  • immigrants as violent, crime-ridden, and not integrating into the society
  • loss of faith in Europe
  • almost total ignoring of US trends and experience
  • perspective that societies are unchangeable, that Europeans don't change when they emigrate, that Muslims don't change
  • perspective that European culture/society is very vulnerable to change and loss of old historic values
  • alienation from modern life, art, 
  • the author's perception is that migrants are unskilled, unlike the US where several groups are more highly skilled than the norm for Americans.
One thing which strikes me--human societies have problems with too rapid changes. Sometimes the reaction is over-reaction, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Sometimes we can succeed in what I'd call "metering change"--taking measures which tend to slow the pace of change down to a speed which is acceptable.  I think that was the case with the New Deal and subsequent farm programs--they didn't save farmers for good, but they "flattened the curve", spreading the change over a longer time with a slower pace.

Friday, July 17, 2020

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

MFP and CFAP and ?

Politico has a piece on Trump's payment programs for farmers, which have set new records, arguing it will be difficult to cut back.

It's not Trump's fault, entirely. Yes, he bears responsibility for the trade war with China, which then justified $23 billion in MFP payments, and seems not to have accomplished much. But the payments under CFAP to cushion the blows of the pandemic are as big, or will be bigger.  And farm state Democrats are as eager as Republicans to fund the payments. 

I'm waiting for the WTO evaluation of the programs, but Trump is likely to pull us out of that as well.

Monday, June 15, 2020

R.I.P. Freedom to Farm

Sen. Pat Roberts is retiring.  He was the ranking Republican/Chair of House Agriculture Committee last century.  His big thing was what he called "Freedom to Farm", ending government regulations and programs.  That became the informal title of the 1996 farm bill.

I don't think many farmers believe the reforms worked, either in the early 2000's or now.  Today's Farm Policy has an article on the current state of government help for agriculture.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Farm Income for 2020

From Illinois extension:
DTN Ag Policy Editor Chris Clayton reported this week that, “An updated economic analysis looking at the impact of COVID-19 projects crop farmers to see $11.85 billion in lower revenue in 2020 and all livestock sectors combined to see a $20.24 billion drop in receipts for the year.
And here, a report of "nearly $25 billion" in federal aid to farmers.

So farmers overall will make out okay this year?  

(Actually, because the aid can't exactly match the losses, some farmers will make out well, others will lose bigly.)


[Updated: see this report on where the aid might go.]

Thursday, December 05, 2019

Farmers Abroad Know How to Protest

I remember the times when farmers brought their tractors to the Mall to protest our agricultural policies.  (The description in the wikipedia article may not be the most accurate. I took a chance on "American Agricultural Movement", which was the sponsoring organization.  Wikipedia has a better post on it. 

It seems that both the French farmers and German ones have the same tactic.

Thursday, November 07, 2019

Parable of the Forms

As an ex-bureaucrat I'm always interested in forms.  Here's the link to an academic paper entitled "The Parable of the Forms". The author is trying, I think, to address some issues of legal procedure by translating them into the language of a university bureaucracy.  I was struck by some parallels in USDA history.

Very briefly, when the New Deal created the farm programs in the 1930's it seems each field crop had its own program and, sometimes, its own bureaucracy.  In addition, there were siloed initiatives for conservation, housing, rural regeneration etc.

Over the years there were a number of reorganizations of these basic elements.  Also, over the years and underway when I came on board was a drive to generalize the crop programs.  When I started we had wheat and feed grains, upland cotton, ELS cotton, producer rice, and farm rice. Over time the programs were changed so by the time I retired we just had "program crops" and "ELS cotton", but then we'd added oilseeds, and a number of other categories.

The paper's author argues there's an ebb and flow to the forms issue, and to his legal issue: sometimes focused on the differences in situations and sometimes on the commonalities.  Perhaps there's a similar dynamic with programs.  Or perhaps I'm full of it.