Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY ---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

June 2007

Do Farm Program Payments Help Rural Communities?

Dear Friends,
As a new farm bill is being formulated, haggled over and run up the flagpole to see who salutes, policy questions about the wisdom of our current food and farm policy linger.

Do direct commodity payments to farmers help rural communities? Do unlimited payments help family farmers? Which programs do the most for family farmers? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

USDA doesn’t comment on the chicken and egg, but they do tell us that farms receiving commodity payments account for 64 percent of crop production in the nation and 45 percent of livestock production. So these producers are more likely to be full-time, active farmers and operate on relatively large farms as well.

Again, according to USDA, conservation programs typically go more to part-time or retired landowners, although 60 percent of EQIP payments are set aside for livestock producers dealing with environmental issues, and who may or may not raise crops.

The federal piggy bank for commodity payments is much larger, around $8 billion in 2004, compared to a mere $2 billion for the conservation programs. However, with the new farm bill, these numbers might get closer together as the popularity of conservation programs grows.

Many farmers receive payments from both types of programs, but the numbers aren’t as large as you might think. Of the 40 percent of farms that received government payments in 2004, 17 percent received payments from commodity and conservation programs. That’s only about 6 percent of the total number of farms in the U.S.

It is all interesting stuff to ponder, and our lawmakers in Washington, D.C. are paying attention to these types of numbers. But those of us out here on the land just want to know if the programs actually work. Do they increase farm income? Do they pump needed revenue into rural communities? Do they help us prosper? Do they keep people on the family farm?

Our gut feeling would be that commodity and conservation program payments put money in the pockets of farm families that need it. These payments, although quite small for most area farmers, help pay the bills and help farmers purchase inputs, improve their facilities and pay the family and farm expenses. So we might guess that program payments do keep people on the farm and they circulate around our communities and help rural businesses in that way too.

But the data collected by USDA suggests otherwise. The high program payments of the mid-1990’s did little or nothing to stem the migration out of rural counties. During periods when some rural areas were gaining population, the rural counties most dependent upon government farm program payments saw the greatest loss of population.

The problem might be that a dismal ag commodity economy that relies heavily on government payments to stay in the black, does little to increase the diversity and resilience of rural counties or to foster the creative, capitalist spirit of farmers on the land.

So, it will probably take more than an investment in commodity and conservation program payments from a farm bill to enrich rural America. Most of the research shows that a healthy economy combined with good farm returns and broad-based programs that help transfer farm land to another generation, help rural businesses expand and help grow rural infrastructure are all just as important to us as farm program payments. Now that we have everything figured out with the farm bill, it’s time to tackle the chicken and egg question.

Hope you have a good week.