> Yeah, lots of families here:
> http://farm.ewg.org/top_recips.php?fips=00000&progcode=total
Rice and cotton are another story. But you look at those subsidities
and they were price support for when the commodity cost dropped far
below cost of production. Granted, in the south, there are some
massive corporate farms, but I scanned the list down into the 300s and
still didn't find anything in Iowa.
The reality is that for rice/cotton production, I doubt that there are
many family farms just because of the volotility of those markets as
well as cost of production. In the deep south, farming has pretty much
always been big business.
Where I do have a problem with the above situation, though, is that
there should be a little more free and open market. If the commodity
price of cotton and rice is too low to sustain itself, then convert
over to something else for a while until the prices come back.
Unfortunately, in the real world, this usually means loss of
capability and allowing other producers to dominate in a way that
there will never be any recovery. Once we lose cotton and rice
production, it will forever be gone.
And then it begs the question of what happens to the people who worked
that industry? A couple billion dollars to a handful of producers to
sustain production provides employment to a whole lot of people. If we
didn't prop up the crop price, we would have spent just as much, if
not a whole lot more on other programs to help the unemployed.
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
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