meanwhile fruit & veggie growers, beekeepers, csa’s etc get jack!!!

you bet there is a serious problem with subsidies. more of these crops are grown then needed and sometimes in wetlands and marginal ground which dramatically affects the amount of pollinator and songbird habitat. i agree that subsidies are the root of many problems in rural america.

Unfortunately, I cannot “recommend an objective source” for information on the impact of farm subsidies.

There are three reasons for this: the first, is that there is so much argumentation, and intentional misinformation, on the topic that it’s impossible for anyone to determine what’s truthful or accurate.

The second reason is that even the most seasoned agricultural economists I know perpetually despair of determining what is meaningful data about subsidies from the welter of competing diatribes.

The third reason is that agricultural subsidies come in so many shapes and sizes, from so many sources, via so many different avenues, that it would take a supercomputer to model actually what’s going on. But climatologists can’t make that approach work, so that’s pretty pointless, too.

But there are suggestive data, such as how it’s now become as profitable in the UK to grow weeds, as it is to grow wheat. Yes. It’s subsidies.
http://www.rspb.org.uk/news/details.asp?id=tcm:9-218463

When weeds are as profitable as food, you *know* something has gone wrong with subsidies.

As for the remarks of Jeremy, I’d respond to them, but he may have accidentally posted in the wrong forum.

Andy.

I did over simplify my thoughts on the subject. I think there needs to be alternative systems like crop insurance and minimum commodity pricing. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any ideas on how changes should actually take place, but I think part of it needs to be an increase in food prices across the board, especially for foods that result from commodity crops (like processed food and animal products). As I said in the post, food prices for healthy foods (i.e. fresh fruits and veggies) need to decrease while prices for unhealthy foods like processed goodies and animal products need to increase. Subsidies might play a role in cases where a farmer won’t be able to make a minimum amount for his or her crop due to external factors like weather, like a supplement to crop insurance.

I do my best to understand the financial complexities of working a real farm and do not mean in any way to say that farmers should be left out in the cold.

Nearly everyone loves to criticize agricultural subsidies, and nearly all of the critics point the subsidy finger at the US — even though the European Union spends, through its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) over sixty percent of all income tax on ag subsidies.

So, if you’re an ag subsidy critic, point your finger where it counts the most.

If you still want to be an ag subsidy critic after pointing your finger in the proper direction, consider the realities of farming. As an industry, farming is economically unique. The farmer purchases inputs at retail, sells the result at wholesale, and, what’s worst–makes production decisions without any reliable notion of what the harvest will bring.

Everyone else further down the food chain needs merely to take the farmers’ products, to add costs plus an allowance for profit, and to sell food to consumers.

Without subsidies as a safety net, the only “natural” economic factor that would govern the farm economy would be the annual level of farm bankruptcies. If that’s your favored factor, agricultural credit would dry up, and domestic food production would become unreliable.

So let’s not castigate subsidies *too* much. They have their place, and the question is, how much is *too* much.

In Europe, farmers are essentially gardeners on the public dole, which is excessive. Several countries in Africa, meanwhile, have reaped tremendous benefits from very small subsidies.

Let’s all be nice, and have an appropriate level of sympathy for the economically difficult situation of farmers. Unless they’re just gardeners on the public dole.

Maybe I just don’t know enough about lobbyists, capitalism, etc (all that non-science stuff) but it seems to me that subsidies are the biggest issue. Subsidies allow companies to work outside of the normal supply and demand forces. Combine that with lax regulation, and you get the mess we have today – across just about every industry I can think of.

PS: I like kittens, not so sure about babies yet