Death of Dairy Farming in the USA

jerniebert

jerniebert

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FAH1223 said:
Family farmers are going out of business. Corporate ones are booming and owned by hedge funds and shid.
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I know a lot of family farmers around here. I went to school with a lot of farm families. My wife's meth head sister had a child with a family farmer. I work at a beef plant and around dairy farmers everyday. I talk to a lot of family farmers. They all get government kickbacks. This is not the media telling me. These are the farmers telling me this information.
 
FAH1223

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jerniebert said:
I know a lot of family farmers around here. I went to school with a lot of farm families. My wife's meth head sister had a child with a family farmer. I work at a beef plant and around dairy farmers everyday. I talk to a lot of family farmers. They all get government kickbacks. This is not the media telling me. These are the farmers telling me this information.
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how big are they? you in Cali?
 
jerniebert

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FAH1223 said:
how big are they? you in Cali?
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Yeah I'm in Cali. Don't get me wrong their is one mexican family who runs most distribution and the majority of farms. Largest distributor in the world. Most of their money was made by government kickbacks. A lot of the farms around here are owned by redneck white people, Armenians, and Portuguese. Indians have started to stake their claim as well. The largest cattle buyer used to own the company I work at. I went to school with most his family. I know the 3rd largest raisin farmer and he has something like 5000 acres of grape fields. My wife's nephews family is not the biggest but hes an old white man with about a 1000 acres of mostly almonds. He just bought a 2 million dollar home. Spends 2000 a month just on landscaping a month. Most farmers have money around here. Very few struggle. The value of the land alone keeps them in the green. I can't speak for other areas like the midwest but the ones I deal with don't struggle. Our company is based in the midwest so we get lots of midwest farmer kids.

But one constant they all admit to is government kickbacks.
 
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jerniebert said:
I'm sure they get plenty of government funding to help them. Ag people are the biggest abusers of our tax dollars.
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The vast majority of government kickbacks go to the largest, wealthiest farmers.

Small family farms have been getting screwed left and right for 100 years now. They're literally being devastated. If it was a cash cow then a lot more people would do it, but the government cash cow is very specific to certain industries and, like the author says, certain groups who can exploit it.

I got an uncle who quit his job to try to make it in farming (fruit and shyt in Indiana) so I hear some from him directly, but you want to really get a feel for the situation then read some stuff about the urban farmers trying to make headway in Detroit or go to Wendell Berry for the history of family farms in Kentucky and the south. Government is not their friend.
 
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Rhakim said:
The vast majority of government kickbacks go to the largest, wealthiest farmers.

Small family farms have been getting screwed left and right for 100 years now. They're literally being devastated. If it was a cash cow then a lot more people would do it, but the government cash cow is very specific to certain industries and, like the author says, certain groups who can exploit it.

I got an uncle who quit his job to try to make it in farming (fruit and shyt in Indiana) so I hear some from him directly, but you want to really get a feel for the situation then read some stuff about the urban farmers trying to make headway in Detroit or go to Wendell Berry for the history of family farms in Kentucky and the south. Government is not their friend.
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Like I said I can only speak on my experiences which are mostly based in California. Most farmers don't struggle much here. They all get kickbacks and they don't give up their farms.
 
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jerniebert said:
Like I said I can only speak on my experiences which are mostly based in California. Most farmers don't struggle much here. They all get kickbacks and they don't give up their farms.
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Even in California, small farmers struggle. You named a bunch of huge farms as your examples.

California's raisin farmers are struggling

Organic milk market sours for Sonoma, Marin dairy farmers


This explains some of the factors behind the death of small farms, including the bias in government assistance:

Small Farms & Big Business: Family Farms Struggle against Industrial Agriculture

Salatin’s book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal details the many ways that the federal government saddles farmers with excess paperwork, regulations, and bureaucracy. He thinks this burden is, at least in part, facilitated by big agricultural producers who have the staff and funds to meet heavy regulatory demands. Big farms set high barriers of entry for small ones, making it difficult for operations such as Salatin’s to compete.

Whether it’s subsidies, crop insurance, federal regulations, or even conservation programs, says Salatin, there is often a “prejudice against scale.” In a centralized system of regulation and control, diversity makes standards more difficult to enforce. But to dispense with variation is not just detrimental to land, animals, and community; Salatin also believes it hampers new farmers, because “innovation starts embryonically, creation starts small.”

Federal insurance programs traditionally come in two forms: yield and revenue insurance. The USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) formulates insurance policies, sets premium rates, and subsidizes the cost for farmers and insurance providers. But big businesses often receive larger subsidies, rewarding powerful and politically connected farming operations over small family farms. “There have been a series of policy decisions at the federal level that have greatly influenced where we are today — where farms are larger, there are fewer family farms, and fewer vibrant rural communities,” Paul Wolfe of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition told me.

One particularly bad culprit is the harvest price option (HPO) crop-insurance policy. While traditional crop insurance protects farmers from catastrophic losses, those who can afford higher premiums buy an HPO policy. Traditional crop insurance pays farmers when the price at harvest is less than projected prices at planting. But HPO policies guarantee that farmers will be paid eitherthe projected price at planting time, or the market price at harvest — whichever is higher. “This product goes above and beyond the definition of a safety net,” wrote the R Street Institute, a libertarian think tank, in a letter to Congress last year. “It is the crop insurance equivalent of your auto insurer surprising you with a new Cadillac Escalade after you’ve totaled your Toyota Corolla.”

Craig Cox, the senior vice president for agriculture resources at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), says the HPO is less an insurance policy than a price support. “The odds are very high they’re going to make money,” says Cox. “The rate of return in some instances was 300 or 400 percent. With crop insurance, we’re subsidizing so much normal business risk, you can make decisions to expand, buy, or rent more land, without having to worry about risk that would normally make you think twice, or make you diversify your crops.”

Those who oppose the Farm Bill (of which the HPO is one component) cross party lines, forming unexpected partnerships. The EWG joins libertarian-leaning groups such as The R Street Institute and Taxpayers for Common Sense in opposing current agricultural policies. Their reasons are ecological, economic, and political: Crop insurance is bad for the land and also bad for the taxpayer. In 2012, the harvest price option boosted payouts to corn and soybean farmers by $6 billion — money that comes from the federal government and thus from the pockets of average citizens. “The overwhelming cost is borne by us,” says Joshua Sewell, a policy analyst for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “We also bear the cost of the crop-insurance companies, as well as the cost of loss when it occurs. It’s a triangle of waste.”

Catherine Cochran, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, acknowledged that because of the way USDA programs function, “more funds go to larger farms,” and perceptions of a disparity in coverage “may not be totally false.” However, she also pointed to efforts the department is making to reach out to smaller growers, such as their microloan initiative and “Whole Farm Revenue Protection” (WFRP), a measure introduced in the 2014 Farm Bill. In contrast to more conventional crop-insurance policies, WFRP offers greater security to smaller, diversified farm producers.

This year, President Obama proposed $9 billion in cuts to the USDA budget — cuts that focus in on crop-insurance programs such as the HPO policy. It’s impossible for the budget to entirely eliminate the Harvest Price Option plan, but Obama’s proposed cuts would drastically trim the federal funds that undergird it. In a joint press release, the R Street Institute and National Taxpayers Union joined Friends of the Earth U.S. and the EWG in applauding these budget cuts.
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