Chris Reeves had a diary a couple days ago, discussing the Trump budget, and its proposed cuts to crop insurance subsidies specifically. I truly enjoyed reading it, as farm policy is near and dear to my heart. I am an active member of a farm organization, and have participated in the writing of our group’s policy for several years now. I’m not professing to be an expert, or anything close to it, but I do have a cursory knowledge of it and some opinions about it.
First, the proposed cut: The proposal is to cap a farmer’s crop insurance subsidy at $40,000/year received. Let’s talk about that number, and its ramifications. Using myself as an example, and using real rough numbers, I think I can illustrate this fairly clearly. I write a check for Multi-Peril Crop Insurance (MPCI) each year somewhere in the neighborhood of $17,000. My subsidy level is somewhere near 60%, so you can assume that the government is paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000 into my policy each year. I have what I would consider to be near the median-sized farm in my county. Knowing that, a person could infer that someone with a farm up to 40% larger than the median in my county could still collect the full subsidy, before feeling any crunch.
The largest farmers, as in any other business, have the most advantage (buying in bulk, spreading risk, making large volume profits off of small per-acre net returns, etc). This has allowed them to become larger, and larger, and larger over time, at the expense of both smaller producers and rural communities. I am not opposed to the largest farmers having to bear more risk on the largest of their acreages. In theory, a policy like this, if done correctly, would allow more folks who had the desire to farm, to do so. Agriculture has gone the way of technology, of manufacturing, of finance, etc., in that it has come to reward the largest (and thereby most efficient) producers, while necessarily making it harder for those at the small end of the spectrum to remain competitive, or even remain solvent. That cycle then repeats, another round of producers sells or rents out their ground, and on we go, larger and larger.
The problem I have with this budget cut is, as you now know, not that it cuts the top end of crop insurance subsidies for the largest farmers. And it’s entirely possible that the number would need to be adjusted higher, as I’m not as familiar with what subsidies are paid into corn and soybean policies in the midwest. But a cap is not unreasonable. Capping subsidies is unreasonable if you turn around and give those dollars to defense contractors. What sort of country have/will we become, if you must take money from your nation’s farmers and give it to the MIC, which is volumes larger than any other in the world, to make it even larger? This money could be spent on boosting food aid domestically, increasing funding to rural economic development agencies (to stay with the Farm Bill theme), or used to help get better teachers to the places they’re most needed, rural or urban. It is simply bizarre to me that all other domestic needs and policies are being asked to feed the insatiable need of the defense industry, by a guy who ran for president as an isolationist. Fuck him, forget that plan. We can have a discussion about farm policy, as I’ve tried to do in this diary, but farmers should absolutely refuse to have that discussion when subsequent ones are about tax cuts and defense spending. /end rant