Conservative Values: Project 2025 Grabs the Bull by Only One Horn
Conservative Values: Project 2025 Grabs the Bull by Only One Horn
Daren Bakst’s Project 2025 chapter on The Department of Agriculture presents a simple, clear description of what we have long known about conservative values for agriculture, from the first sentence to the last sentence. They proclaim support for efficiency, productivity, economy, (i.e. cheap food,) and food safety, arguing that the Department of Agriculture and farm bills should focus only on these areas. On the other hand, they oppose having USDA support the values of equity and environmental “protection and management,” including responses to the climate crisis, which, Bakst pointed out, are included in the Biden Administration’s mission statement and actions for agriculture.
In part this is a kind of originalism. So conservatives argue that, if in the past, we expressed only certain values in relation to farm programs, then we should also actualize only these today. I have to wonder though, if food safety is an acceptable value, why isn’t environmental safety an acceptable value for USDA, to protect us from the hazards and damages of agriculture. Likewise, during the early farm bill years there was no idea that we would have an enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, nor was there an understanding that we’d have a massive crisis caused by climate change. In a number of ways, Project 2025 opposes learning anything new over the past 70 years, including with regard to values, and so it opposes actualizing any values via farm programs that people failed to adequately actualize in the past.
Conservative Farm Policy in Relation to the Environmental Problems of Agriculture
Of course, the original farm bill did include a large component for conservation, which also means environment. Project 2025 ignores this inconsistency. And, in the end, the Project 2025 chapter on agriculture does support some conservation measures, while opposing the most important ones, in a section called “Reform Conservation Programs.” There first priority here is to “Champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program,” (CRP,) arguing in part that “Farmers should not be paid... not to farm.” So here they see the connection between the still existing CRP and former supply reduction programs. And in fact, CRP, which was started in 1985, has contributed significantly toward reducing oversupply, including after supply reduction programs were ended in 1995. So it has helped keep farm prices closer to, or even sometimes above, full cost levels. It has also helped the U.S. lose less money on farm exports, but no where does Project 2025 show a recognition of that issue.
A second huge conservation program that is specifically opposed by Project 2025 is conservation compliance, which is seen as “NRCS overreach.” The plan calls for “removing its authority to prescribe specific practices on a particular farm operation in order to ensure continued eligibility to participate in USDA farm programs.” They conclude that, “At a minimum, a new Administration should support legislation to divest more power to the states (and possibly local SWCDs) regarding erodible land and wetlands conservation.” Additionally they recommend that farmers write their own “best practices” plans, without input from NRCS experts, a sort of voluntary approach, at least with regard to the standards of compliance. This would give conservative areas the ability to allow soil erosion and other forms of environmental damage, in exchange for short term profits. Both CRP and Conservation Compliance have played huge roles in reducing the enormous crisis of soil erosion.
With regard to conservation values, the report emphasizes that “Farmers, in general, are excellent stewards of the land, if not for moral or ethical considerations, then out of self-interest…,” citing Tom Driscoll of the NFU on the point that “Farmers are often called the original conservationists.” These days, in light of various major environmental problems from agriculture, this kind of a statement is quite controversial, and harshly criticized. Here, then, is another way that Project 2025 claims to be pro farmer, and to take a strong stand to “defend American agriculture” from blame.
Of course, as I’ve argued above, Republicans, long representing the interests of agribusiness against those of farmers, have devastated U.S. agriculture, and Project 2025 adds another nail to this coffin. Ending CRP, in addition to it’s environmental consequences, adds another nail of economic injustice to this coffin.
While CRP in the Conservation Title very significantly assists against the crisis of economic farm injustice that the massive reduction and elimination of key Commodity Title provisions have caused, the environmental impacts from those reductions and eliminations are even bigger, are, in fact, the biggest, most structural environmental factors in farm program history. This is an issue that farmers have long warned against, to little avail, such as in the approved resolutions of the United Farmer and Rancher Congress of 1986. (https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/Delegate%20Approved%20Resolutions.pdf)
Now, in the 21st century, the data supporting the claims about farm program reductions and the environment have become exceptionally dramatic. Here’s what has been done to farmers via Commodity Title reduction and elimination, in relation to environmental protection and damage. Over seven decades, continuing market failure combined with lower and lower price floors has resulted in cheaper and cheaper farm prices for corn and other feed grains, soybeans and other crops. As a result, giant feedlots and hog and poultry CAFOs have been able to purchase feed ingredients cheaper than farmers could raise the feed crops. This gave a competitive advantage to the CAFOs over diversified farming systems.
As a result, all across the main crop production regions, in addition to their cheaper and cheaper grain prices, most farms have lost all value-added livestock and poultry. In Iowa, for example, while most farms had multiple livestock and poultry enterprises in 1950, during the New Deal parity years, after seven decades of continuing reductions we now have hardly any farms with poultry or dairy sales or hogs, and most farms have also lost all cattle as well. Lacking livestock, most farms have then also lost the diversity of low input sustainable livestock crops, pastures, hay and nurse crops for these like oats. As these sustainable crops have have been lost, more and more land has gone into high input row crops like corn and soybeans. These losses of sustainable crops, including permanent pastures, tended to be on hillier ground, and ground closer to streams. This massive structural change has been an environmental disaster. Of course, this is not at all what things looked like originally, when the farm bill was started in the 1930s, so the conservative case for originalism is especially irrational and damaging here. (On these matters see these sources, which draw upon data from the Census of Agriculture. https://familyfarmjustice.me/2022/07/31/you-cant-fix-sustainability-without-justice/, https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-decline-of-farming-in-iowa-pt-1pdf/251892145)
These structural changes fostered, and were in turn strengthened, by additional changes. For example, with cheaper and cheaper farm prices combined with the increasing loss of value-added livestock and poultry, surviving farmers have increasingly turned to off farm jobs, as can be seen dramatically in Census of Agriculture data and data showing the farmers share of the food dollar. (https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-decline-of-farming-in-iowa-part-2-farmer-impacts/251999871) Increases in the speed of the depreciation of farm purchases has contributed to these changes, by giving farmers even bigger tax write-offs for their increasing off-farm income. These factors have led to reduced labor availability for farming, and greater capital availability. Labor is especially needed in diversified systems, especially those utilizing livestock. So here again, the cheaper and cheaper farm prices that have resulted from increasingly conservative farm policies have forced farmers into less and less sustainable farming systems, into causing increasing damage to the environment.
The structural damages of conservative farm policies that favor agribusiness over farmers, then occur on farms and also extend far beyond farms. On farms, farmers have increasingly lost the infrastructure for diversity, as well as the knowledge base that goes with that. They’ve lost a lot of fences for livestock plus various kinds of livestock facilities. Back in the 1950s, most farms across a wide region had cattle facilities, including dairy facilities, plus hog houses and chicken houses and related equipment. Our barn included quite a variety of facilities and equipment for milking cows, including feed storage bins that opened up down stairs through chutes from the hay mow, and, of course, there was also a chute for hay.
The infrastructure for diversity and sustainability has also been lost in rural communities. For example, as these changes progressed, my local elevator quit grinding feed for livestock or buying oats, (some of which would be used in the feeds). Today, there’s a risk of local elevators no longer being available to farmers who haul grain to town with tractors and wagons, and who do not own a semi truck. We have also lost local livestock sales barns and large animal veterinarians, and local lockers. Finally, then, in these and other ways, the increasing loss of the infrastructure for diversity affects whole regions. Things that farmers need to purchase for diverse operations have often become farther and farther away. All of this significantly damages resilience and efficiency, as discussed farther below. An additional point is that the oppression I’ve described of all farmers, who are mostly not organic, also greatly hurts organic farmers, who have then lost supportive infrastructure.
Resiliency of Rural Communities.
We see, then, that increasingly conservative farm policies, led by Republicans in Congress, have made it increasingly difficult for farmers to be good conservationists, as good as they used to be. This was all done, in turn, to serve special big business interests at the expense of farmers, the interests of the agribusiness output complex, (buying from farmers at cheaper and cheaper market prices,) the agribusiness input complex, (which has benefitted from reducing and ending supply reductions, and from greatly reducing the amount of low-input sustainable livestock crops, then replaced by high input crops,) and the CAFO complex. What’s a farmer to do with hilly ground when they have no need for livestock pastures or hay to feed livestock? This has all led, in turn, to increasing criticism of farmers, far beyond what we’ve ever seen in our history, criticism caused by increasing conservatism at the expense of farmers. Let me repeat that. The increasing oppression of farmers by Republicans, and the very successful concealment of that oppression with the smokescreen of farm subsidies, has led to massive farmer bashing.
In response, Project 2025 has made it a priority, not to stop oppressing farmers on behalf of CAFOs and agribusiness, (they call for maintaining and increasing that,) but to merely fight against the blame that farmers are receiving for the increasing environmental damage that Conservative policies have caused on farms.
Tragically, the Democrats who have been the biggest heroes to farmers, the rural Progressive populists, those who fought hard to restore adequate updated New Deal style market management programs, (running farm programs like a business instead of like a welfare program,) gave up on these efforts in 2001 for lack of adequate urban-progressive support over decades. They gave up and switched sides, offering a greened up version of the 1996 “Freedom to Fail” approach, with big subsidies. This change seems to have been stimulated by the Democrats taking over leadership in the Senate in 2001, with Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin, of “Harkin-Gephardt” fame, becoming Senate Agriculture Chair. (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/27/2149576/-The-Harkin-Compromise-on-the-Farm-Bill) At this point, however, the weak Democratic Party approach continually if modestly points in the opposite direction from the bad Conservative policies we have now, and that Project 2025 would make worse.
Paradoxically, shortly after the Harkin compromise of 2001, we saw a huge rise of the urban Food Movement and Environmental Movement sectors that work on farm policy. Here finally were the prospects of a stronger Farm Justice Movement than ever. But then, here too was a great tragedy. The Family Farm Movement, (which had had it’s funding greatly reduced in the 1990s,) was unable to teach and convince the new movement sectors what a real, (i.e. market management,) farm bill was. Under the leadership of authors like Michael Pollan they got it partly right, teaching widely that cheap prices, (cheap food, cheap corn, cheap sugar,) serves as a de facto subsidy for CAFOs, junk food and export dumping. But then, instead of calling for restoration of New Deal style market management programs, Pollan and the others merely called for eliminating farm subsidies, as if that was the policy problem. In short, they called for ending farm subsidies without calling for ending the need for farm subsidies. In one key kind of failure, for example, leaders of the new movement, including Tom Philpott, Anna Lappe, Mark Bittman, Dan Imhoff, and groups like the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine cited an article by Tim Wise and Alicia Harvey which called for ending the “implicit subsidies” for agribusiness by restoring market management. In the process of citing the Wise, Harvey paper however, they were thrown off by the term “implicit subsidies” which they interpreted in terms of this false, quite detailed “subsidy reform” paradigm. (Again, for the larger correction see of the dozens of farm subsidy myths see https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZIOiwv1Nr6jn9SsnE62z1P_hitZKTBaD.) So they concluded that all you needed to do is end subsidies and return, basically, to conservative, free-market Hooverism, to what we had prior to the New Deal, which, in turn, closely parallels Project 2025. (https://znetwork.org/zblogs/philpott-bittman-imhoff-lappe-are-wrong-about-tim-wise/)
One term that has been increasingly used by progressives in relation to solutions for agriculture is “resilience,” and that term is also included in Project 25’s chapter on agriculture as one of their values. We see this right away in the second sentence. “Because of the innovation and resilience of the nation’s farmers, American agriculture is a model for the world.” As we have seen, however, by increasingly implementing conservative farm policies and programs, Republicans have greatly damaged the resilience of farmers, economically and agronomically, (as well as their ability to innovate). Project 2025 also shows how conservatives seek to greatly damage political resilience, such as in farm politics. In close relation to this, and to another of their main values, they’ve also greatly damaged the efficiency of farming. In the past, farmers had great diversity, so they could safely manage environmentally sensitive areas. With seven decades of increasing reductions, however, most of this environmental resilience has been lost.
Increasing conservatism in farm programs has also led to major losses of economic resilience and efficiency. As stated above, major key crop programs that were reduced over decades were ended in the 1996 farm bill, which was called “Freedom to Farm,” (i.e. as if free markets work for farmers). A major aspect of this phrasing was the idea that, without supply management, farmers could make freer choices in their farming operations. When it comes to economic resiliency and efficiency, however, one of the biggest choices farmers had when grain prices were on the low side, was to hold back more livestock and use up more of the under priced grain that way, adding value to it. This “livestock option” was a major freedom that many farmers had. With more and more conservative farm programs, however, this freedom has been mostly lost. So today, when there are no price floors and supply reductions to protect them from giant agribusiness firms paying cheap prices, this economic freedom has been almost entirely lost.
While “the livestock option” gave farmers economic resilience and efficiency and less dependency with regard to the ever more concentrated agribusiness output complex, a second major option, “the crop rotation option,” gave farmers resilience and efficiency with regard to the ever more concentrated agribusiness input complex. In response to high input costs, farmers have had the freedom to increase their acreages of low input sustainable livestock crops, and decrease their acreages of high input crops. This too is closely tied to livestock ownership, and has been almost entirely lost by farms in major farming areas. So, in contrast to the spin, the Republican “Freedom to Farm” bill was really one more step toward farmers losing these two crucial freedoms, (another nail in the farmer’s coffin).
Additionally, while the Project 2025 report argues that the Biden administration “minimizes the importance of efficient agricultural production,” Biden’s approach is actually better, through its increased funding of conservation and sustainability. While the report claims to “remove obstacles that hinder food production,” what this really means, according to their various recommendations, is further removing obstacles that foster environmentally damaging, and resiliency damaging, practices. Here again, Republicans have gotten the issues of agriculture backwards. They’ve pounded more nails into the farmers’ coffins than what is currently being done.
A major consequence of conservative’s and Project 2025’s narrow focus on the values of efficiency and productivity is the way their policies and programs have reduced rural wealth creation. Behind this is a narrow, reductionist paradigm for economics. At times conservatives have loudly celebrated “value added” agriculture, such as when CAFOs were being supported in a variety of ways at the expense of diversified farms by conservative politicians. As was well known in advance, however, these claims for CAFOs were false. For example, agricultural economist John Ikerd found that “If new contract hog units were to replace independent operations producing the same number of hogs, approximately two hog farmers would be left without jobs for each new job created." (http://web.missouri.edu/ikerdj/papers/con-hog.htm) So one result was fewer and poorer jobs. Ikerd also pointed to 56 studies on the impact of CAFOs and other concentrated systems on rural communities, concluding that
Virtually every study done on the subject in the past 20 years has confirmed the inevitable negative community impacts of CAFOs. Research consistently shows that the social and economic quality of life is better in communities characterized by small, diversified family farms. (http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ra08/ikerd_low_res.pdf)
Curtis W. Stofferahn described the results of the 56 studies in more detaile here. (https://www.ndrurallife.com/Industrialized%20Farming%20and%20Its%20Relationship%20to%20Community%20Well%20Being.pdf)
The root flaw in conservative, reductionist economics is that it leaves out the negative affects of damage to public health, the environment, and community well being on the economy, and especially on wealth creation. This flip side of this is that it leaves out the positive affects to public health, social well being and the environment of practices that enhance these, rather than damaging them. Part of what this means is that reductionist, conservative policies and programs also damage the economy, damage wealth creation.
International business consultant Charles Hampden-Turner explained this in Charting the Corporate Mind. He pointed out that values cannot be simply added together. You can’t simply add together a good milage and powerful performance when building cars, for example. What you face are dilemmas. What’s really needed, (and what creates wealth in the real world,) is a reconciliation of values, not a mere adding of values. If you concentrate hogs into large concentrated animal feeding operations on a few farms, for example, you remove a fertilizer source from many farms, and create a pollution problem on others. You also damage values of environmentalism, health, and a wide variety of social values in communities. So as Conservatives have lowered farm prices, with most farms in major cropping regions losing all livestock and poultry, with most farms then losing all pasture, hay and nurse crops like oats, to then further damage the infrastructure for diversity on farms, in rural communities, and across rural regions, a wide range of values are reduced, and much less wealth is created than what we had, for example, in the parity years of the Democratic New Deal, and on the surviving diversified farms of today, such as organic farms. In conservative economics, the destruction of rural and other wealth, (and the corresponding creation of wealth in, for example, sustainable, diversified systems,) is simply not part of the paradigm. By definition, it cannot be seen. This, in turn, favors the giant agribusiness and other corporations that fund conservative campaigns, corporations that seek to make money at the expense of the economy as a whole. Further, as Lewis Mumford showed in The Myth of the Machine, these systems are, by nature, authoritarian, and very damaging to political values as well, which also reduces wealth creation. Climate change, which is hugely related to these agricultural issues, and a wide range of other issues as well, by trillions of dollars, damages a plethora of values, severely damaging wealth creation. The conservative approach in Project 2025 is, in short, a recipe for economic disaster, for a reduction in over all wealth for our society.
Project 2025 Opposes Racial Equity at USDA
Equity is a term that’s often used with regard to issues of racial justice. There was tremendous structural racism at the time of the original farm bill, but there was inadequate public and political consciousness of the need for including a focus on the crucial need for racial equity in it. This showed up in supply management rules that allowed white landowners in the South to largely put the supply reduction requirements on the backs of black renters and share croppers. (See Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton.) This led to significant losses of black farmers during the early farm bill years. Three fourths or more of Black farmers were tenants, with a high percentage of sharecroppers among them. More generally, this problem applied to white tenants as well, and not just in the South.
In relation to this, Project 2025’s chapter on agriculture views equity, like climate change, as something “new” to USDA’s mission and expansion. While this may very well have a racial meaning, that isn’t stated specifically, and no specifics are given with regard to equity. This, then, is surely another case of originalism, to leave out racial equity because Congress allowed farm programs to be racist in impact in the past.
Consider these statements from USDA chapter author Baks. He writes, “...The USDA’s mission was and is too broad, including serving as a major welfare agency,” and “The USDA’s ‘client’ is the American people in general, not a subset of interests, such as farmers, meatpackers, environmental groups, etc.” Note in these quotes that farmers are not even considered to be legitimate “clients” of USDA, and that the powerful special interests of agribusiness, for whom conservatives have increasingly designed farm bills and programs, are not included on the singled-out list. Racial minorities are also not specifically mentioned.
Meanwhile, addressing widespread concerns about racial equity has been a big focus for USDA in recent decades, including during the Biden administration. This has involved major settlements with black farmers, in the Pigford and Pigford II legal cases, plus attempts to financially redress historical economic injustices against racial minorities by the Biden administration.
The Larger Issue of Farmer Equity
A major but overlooked aspect of the issue of racial equity in agriculture is the larger issue of general farmer equity, which is the issue of economic farm injustice that remains, in both its general and specifically race-related aspects, largely unknown today. In contrast the importance of general economic farm justice to racial minorities was well known by white and black farmers of the Family Farm Movement over the decades their cooperative work. (https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/ensure-that-farmers-receive-a-fair-living-wage-by-jerry-pennick-heather-gray/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ywo1PX9VYI&list=PL7K_XwGI3jVS4AMDeEdFfHALIOYnoWg53&index=4) As it turns out, in spite of early shortcomings, 1933-1941, during the parity years of 1942-52, the New Deal farm programs significantly increased the ownership of farms and land for nonwhite farmers in the South, who were almost all black. This is seen in data from the Census of Agriculture, where an increase of 12% occurred in the number of Nonwhite part and full owner farms, and an increase of 16% occurred in their land acreages, during the parity years, (between the 1940 and 1950 Censuses of Agriculture). A similar increase, of 13%, occurred for white farms in the South. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/19iFJmS-Nx1gDcc1tC43IgotP9DWGGaGP/view?usp=share_link)
This data also shows the tremendous loss of nonwhite and white farms in the South and all across the nation as price floor levels were decreased under increasingly conservative farm programs, from 1953-1995. Here total loss rates per decade tripled for nonwhite tenant farmers, with almost all initially surviving, (i.e. as of 1950,) nonwhite farmers in the South lost by 1990. These huge losses occurred for both owners and tenants, black and white. It’s hard to argue that this was caused by increased racism, such as during the 1970s and 1980s, compared to the levels of racism of the 1930s and 1940s, and in light of the huge losses of white owner and tenant farmers during the same period.
With regard to Project 2025, and it’s emphasis on originalism, as described above, it’s important to note that the central economic purpose of the New Deal Farm Programs was to increase equity for farmers as a whole, (and as seen in the resulting benefits mentioned above for black and white farmers during the parity years). The goal of this equity is indicated in the meaning of parity, which means equality, and which refers to a goal of equity between U.S. farmers and urban America. The programs were directly designed to give farmers greater equity in relation to agribusiness companies, and this was achieved, as noted farther above. In short, equity, far from being new to USDA farm programs, was the central purpose, the main original purpose, in the invention of the farm bill itself. Project 2025, in it’s originalism, completely misses this.
Project 2025’s Take on Farm Trade
As a recommendation within it’s limited focus for USDA, Project 2025 opposes “trade promotion,” such as “market development programs like the Market Access Program and similar programs.” It does, however, calls for USDA to “remove unjustified foreign trade barriers blocking market access for American agricultural goods.” This kind of language is also included in Project 2025’s “model USDA mission statement.” This clearly supports the long standing conservative position in favor of “free trade,” which, in this case, is based upon their belief that “free” markets work adequately for agriculture. Related to this, the United States has signed on to a number of “free trade” agreements, including, in the 1990s, NAFTA and GATT-WTO. The spin was that these agreements remove red tape and make trade simple and easy. Really, however, they are huge agreements, sometimes two or more feet tall, so many are the pages. They add a large number of requirements, not just for trade, but for the kinds of internal laws that governments all around the world are allowed to pass, so they form a kind of unelected world government, run by the kinds of corporate elites who, with top government officials and otherwise mostly alone, were allowed to write them. They were, then, Project 2025 style agreements that were passed, initially, in the 1990s, as the 1996 “Freedom to Fail” bill was passed, ending what was left of the core, much reduced but still rational, farm programs. So, like farm policy, conservative, Project 2025 style authoritarianism regarding trade was mostly enacted in previous years.
Of course, free trade chronically fails to provide fair trade for U.S. and global agriculture. Instead, it serves as a de-facto but concealed subsidy for giant domestic and multinational agribusiness firms, a subsidy paid, not by taxpayers, but by the world’s farmers. Naturally, any country wanting to make a profit on farm exports, that knows how farm markets work, and that isn’t essentially ruled by giant corporations, is opposed. So countries have wanted to maintain trade barriers that protect them from being exploited.
Meanwhile, the United States has been the dominant exporter, global price leader, and residual supplier for major crops, essentially setting major global farm price levels. We’ve had as much as 70% of world corn exports and 90% of world soybean exports. So as our market price floors, (and therefore price levels,) have been reduced, more and more, and then ended, we have driven down global farm prices. In short, our farm bill has been a major factor in global trade, driving down farm profits and impoverishing rural regions around the world. There we see that the poorest countries in the world are farming countries. Least Developed Countries are close to 70% rural (https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/) as are nearly 80% of the world’s “undernourished.”(p. 3 here https://www.fao.org/docrep/012/i0680e/i0680e00.htm) When the figures include those who have been forced out of rural areas and into urban slums as a result of rural poverty in recent decades, the figures are significantly higher.
What the free trade agreements and the assault on “trade barriers” in the name of “market access,” have done is to more directly force cheap, below cost farm prices into global domestic markets, not just global trade markets. Major multinational agribusiness firms operating in the United States, also operate inside of many other countries around the world. They benefit from being subsidized by farmers in these global internal markets as well. So here again, most of the damage to farmers from authoritarian domination of U.S. trade policy was already done in earlier decades. What Project 2025 does is to call for driving yet another nail into the U.S. and global farmer’s coffin. As agricultural economists at the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, (perhaps the leading group of U.S. academics who specifically recognize the plain facts of the real U.S. and global “farm problem,”) have reminded farmers, “Betting the Farm on Market Access” is a major mistake! (http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/314.html) Additionally, decades of conservative focus on ‘increasing exports,’ (by lowering farm prices to be more ‘competitive’ by losing money on exports,) very clearly “did not deliver.” (http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/2018/939.html, http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/684.html,) In other words, conservative approaches, by denying the economic realities of the “lack of price responsiveness” in agriculture, don’t work in the real world.
Among the few trade barriers that the Project 2025 report identified are “sanitary and phytosanitary measures.” In other words, though they emphasize food safety as an acceptable value elsewhere, they lean against it here. Another category of trade barrier identified in the report is opposition to “biotechnology” and “genetic engineering,” such as in the case where “Mexico plans to ban the importation of U.S. genetically modified yellow corn.” Mexico has done this on the basis of science, however. In a paper on Mexico’s “formal response,” for example, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minnesota emphasized that “Mexico shows that it has the latest independent science firmly on its side.” (https://www.iatp.org/mexicos-science-based-defense-gm-corn-restrictions)
With regard to this latter point, note that Project 2025’s chapter on agriculture claims to be “science-based,” based upon “sound science” in support of “freedom” and “prosperity.” What we have seen, however, is that, for ideological reasons that serve to favor the special corporate interests of agribusiness, the biggest scientific facts about agricultural economics have been denied and ignored, with very tragic consequences, and with the prospect of even much more severe consequences in the future, such as with regard to climate change.
Project 2025’s Opposition to Support for Rural Regions
Among various other things, the Project 2025 chapter on agriculture takes a stand against the inclusion of rural development programs in the farm bill and at USDA. This is part of Bakst’s argument that “the scope of the USDA’s work has expanded well beyond” the “narrow mission” that it had at the time of President Lincoln, when USDA was created. Rural programs fall into his “new” category. When it comes to recommendations, he then mainly criticizes “sustainable development,” which was a goal at the United Nations Food Systems Summit in 2023. Here he quotes USDA’s statement that the summit focused on “poverty, food security, malnutrition, population growth, climate change, and natural resource degradation.” Obviously, given the amount of poverty in so many of the world’s countries, especially rural countries, this list is very understandable. Biden’s take on it can be partly seen as that of a rich country supporting poor countries. But poverty, food security and degrees of malnutrition are also problems in the U.S., as are climate change and resource degradation. Project 2025’s position does not support work on these concerns.
More particularly, the U.S. has had a long history of poverty and hunger in rural areas. The farm justice or equity provisions of the parity farm programs, USDA’s work on racial equity, and the food subsidy provisions of the Nutrition Title which project 2025 wants to weaken, all help to address those concerns. Here, project 2025 basically opposes help for the poor, U.S. and global, who have been so greatly hurt by conservative policies, programs and deregulation.
The biggest issues of rural well being in the U.S. are those of the Commodity Title, however, and not those of the Rural Development Title. Here, due to the increasingly conservative reduction and elimination of the core farm justice policies and programs, rural regions have directly lost trillions of dollars of income and wealth. I’ve calculated this based upon a “Parity” standard of fairness for the years 1953-2010, ( in 2010 dollars,) and got results of more than $4 trillion dollars of reduction for the main field crops and dairy, (https://www.slideshare.net/bradwilson581525/the-hidden-farm-bill-37959389, https://www.slideshare.net/bradwilson581525/farm-bill-net-impacts-which-state-is-the-biggest-loser) plus another $2 trillion for livestock and another $2 trillion for fruits and vegetables. To extend this data to 2024 would add additional trillions. A much lower standard of fairness could be used, and the results would still be in the trillions. Subsidies have not done much to compensate for this, shrinking the reductions for farmers raising the big field crops and dairy by only about one eighth, (assuming the Parity standard of fairness). (See previous link.) At the same time, economic multipliers have been high for agriculture, especially before all of the damage to agricultural resilience from increasingly Republican farm policies and programs. So the full reductions, given the lack of money fed into the multiplication system, is really much greater.
The same holds globally, where early in the 21st century, more than half of the world was rural. Here too, trillions of dollars of farm income have been lost, with even more trillions lost at the full level of economic multiplication. For both U.S. and global farmers, free trade rules have added additional nails to their coffins, and Project 2025 intends to make all of this even worse.
General Opposition to Government
In the end, in general, the conservative position shown in the Project 2025 chapter on agriculture emphasizes that “farmers, and the food system in general, should be free from unnecessary government intervention.” They raise fear that government actions are likely to be bad, and should be curbed. We’ve seen, however, what that really means. They trust the corporate complex, on behalf of whose interests conservatives have so devastated rural America. The Republican’s science-denying free market ideology is a major factor here, as chronic farm market failure has been the primary means for covertly forcing farmers to subsidize the agribusiness complex. Various subsidiary science-denying ideologies have been used as well, such in conservative claims that farm subsidies are “trade distorting,” and that the massive subsidization of both insurance companies and insurance premiums is rational, is in fact, equivalent to the standard business practice of “risk management,” when it’s really an approach that increases farmers’ risks. (http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/2019/972.html)
In contrast to this, what government should really do is protect “we the people” from exactly these kinds of exploitation by the various, enormously powerful sectors of the industrial power complex, such as the agribusiness output, input, and CAFO complexes. The original farm programs of the Democratic New Deal did this, and in powerful ways. Government that does this is not at all the “bad government” that conservative ideology wants us to imagine. On the contrary, it’s conservative corporate government that is bad government, overwhelmingly so. Conservatives are dead wrong.
Normalizing Authoritarianism Against Farmers
Over the past seven decades, conservatives have worked to reduce and end the powerful features of the original farm programs that provided economic justice for farmers against the chronic free market failure that favors the agribusiness input, output and now CAFO complexes. This was seen, decades ago, in the Project 2025-style report, An Adaptive Program for Agriculture, which call for greatly reducing the market management features in the farm programs in order to lower farm income and eradicate “one third” of farmers and farm workers within “five years.” What this also meant, covertly, was a call to greatly increase the subsidization of agribusiness by farmers, at the expense of the farm economy and the U.S. economy as a whole, including its income from farm exports.
These changes were implemented by conservatives in Congress at a significantly slower rate, but to a more extreme degree, over the long haul Project 2025 is the latest contribution to these efforts. While the lions share of the damage occurred over the previous 70 years, Project 2025 adds additional nails to the farmer’s coffin.
In the process of making its case against agriculture, Project 2025 repeatedly makes originalist arguments, while ignoring and denying the biggest factors of what the farm bill originally was.
A major factor in Project 2025 is it’s spin, even to where it is a defender of the agriculture it damages.
For Further Reading
The slide show to accompany this paper will be posted here, initially as a draft version.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UbX-dQxKJla0sUUvwVqrKnBevBP0kYeB?usp=share_link
Brad Wilson, Farm “Shock Doctrine?”, Zspace: Brad Wilson, 2/24/09,
https://zcomm.org/zblogs/farm-shock-doctrine-by-brad-wilson/.
Brad Wilson, The Culture of Corn Farming: Two Paradigms, Zspace, 10/15/09,
https://zcomm.org/zblogs/the-culture-of-corn-farming-two-paradigms-by-brad-wilson/.
Mark Ritchie & Kevin Ristau, "Crisis By Design: A Brief Review of U.S. Farm Policy," League of Rural Voters, 1986, https://www.iatp.org/documents/crisis-design-brief-review-us-farm-policy.
Brad Wilson, “Brad’s Farm Justice Work Online,” Family Farm Justice, https://familyfarmjustice.me/brads-farm-justice-work-online/.