Farm policy has not failed America

One of the worst times to write a new farm bill is when agriculture is experiencing one of its few periods of comparative prosperity, as it is now. It was a different story during the writing of the 1985 farm bill. A sympathetic Time magazine cover story, on Feb. 18, 1985, began, "The hours are long and the work back-breaking. There always seems to be too much of something: rain, sun, insects, sometimes even crops…but somehow the farmer managed to get by."

A Nov. 2, 2007, Time cover story had a decidedly different tone. The writer, Michael Grunwald, blasted the farmer for having it too good. According to Grunwald, "The government still gives farmers your money — more than ever over the past decade — along with research projects to expand their yields, restoration projects for cleaning up their messes, flood control and irrigation projects to protect and enhance their land, visa programs to supply them with cheap labor, ethanol mandates and tariffs to boost their prices, and tax breaks by the bushel." Farmers are not even farmers to Grunwald but agro-industrialists.

If farmers have it so good thanks to a beneficent federal government, then there must be a rush to get into this easy and lucrative farming business. Grunwald admitted that isn't the case. In fact, he noted that the average farm family receives 82 percent of its income from off-farm sources — a job in town. It's not just Grunwald or Time magazine that has this negative attitude. Many articles and editorials in major dailies similarly attack agriculture and the 2007 farm bill.

If government farm policy has been such a colossal failure, then American farmers should be out of business by now and consumers should be getting their food from foreign countries, but that's hardly the case. If there is one thing Americans can rely on, it is their domestic food supply.