I know a fair number of small farmers. Yes, there are surely tax write off farmers – the family we bought this farm from, for example, tapped their maple trees and hauled the raw sap up to the sugar house using a yoke of oxen, but they in reality lived an upper middle class lifestyle due to inherited money and the husband being a surgeon.
But mostly how real small farms survive is with a second income. Usually one person in the family works off-farm and the other manages the goat dairy, hay operation, apple orchard, or whatever the cash crop is. Otherwise there is no way to pay the mortgage. Because profit margins are really low in small farming.
The main problem with farming in the US is that large, huge, and mega-global agricorporations are very well supported by subsidies, political favors, etc. Smaller farmers are left to swing in the arctic wind of global capitalism. In order to compete on that level, most farmers must go deeply into debt to buy enormously expensive farm machinery, just for one example. And a bad year can easily bankrupt them.
Here in rural New England, there’s a thriving small-farm culture still. I am not sure where else this exists in the US, but probably there are pockets. Besides the people still farming the land of their great great grandfathers, there’s a lot of old geezers who were part of the Back To The Land movement of the 1970’s who carved niches for themselves back when land prices were cheap, and a surprising number of young people as well. It’s a good place for it. I get the impression that the bulk of what is produced here is sold locally.
A couple of years back, while watching the eclipse in S IL, I struck up a conversation w/ a guy nearby. Turned out he was an Ag economist w/ the UofI. I forget the specifics, but I recall the certainty with which he averred it as an indisputable fact that farm subsidies as a whole were indefensible In terms of providing support for people in need, encouraging sufficient food production, etc. In his opinion, the overwhelming majority of subsidies went to wealthy individuals and corps. We discussed it at some length, and he indicated considerable familiarity w/ law and economics related to large and small farms in the Midwest.
Yes, I realize that academics can be biased, and I can be overly receptive to opinions that coincide with mine, but I was impressed by this conversation w/ someone who seemed quite familiar w/ the topic from an arguably objective standpoint.
I think he’s right on this one. According to the balance:
Between 1995 and 2019, the top 10% of recipients received 78% of the $223.5 billion doled out, according to EWG. The top 1% received 26% of the payments. That averages out to $1.7 million per company.
EWG is the Environmental Working Group. You can look at a whole bunch of subsidy info on their website.
Also, I found this tidbit interesting, from the same article linked above:
Out of all the crops that farmers grow, the government subsidizes only five of them. They are corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice.
And this one:
California produces the most food by value. Most of it is almonds, wine, dairy, walnuts, and pistachios. These aren’t subsidized.
The interesting thing is that Qld itself is not in most respects particularly right wing. It’s demographically dominated by Brisbane. We have had a Labor (ie left wing) State Government much of the last 25 years. But the large rural electorates are right wing and have this habit of appearing to tip the balance in Federal elections.
Interesting. For an American who has not closely followed Australian society/politics, would it be accurate if I analogized Queensland as the “Texas of Australia”?
Kinda. Firstly how would we ever fit in anything so small as Texas?
But seriously, the difference is that Texas votes in R governors or at least has one at the moment. For the last 25 years or so, Qld has predominantly voted in left wing state governments.*
Thing is, our Federal House of Reps (equiv your Congress) is electorate by electorate not State by State. Which means even when Qld electorates mostly vote Labor (Dem equiv), that doesn’t stop our less cosmopolitan electorates contributing substantially to election of a right wing Federal govt.
*edited to add - indeed our current Premier (equiv of Governor) is probably what you get if you take the reciprocal of Abbott on COVID. Her approach (which I pretty much 100% agree with) has been very tight and we have an astonishingly low rate of infection.
Thank you for that info. So apparently the urban/rural political divide is similar between Queensland and Texas, but in Queensland the left-wingers have the edge, with the opposite being the case in Texas.
Well, our lower house of Congress (the House of Representatives) is technically electorate by electorate as well, except we call electorates “districts” in the USA. So even if the urban populations of a state can overpower the rural regions in the popular vote to elect a Democrat as governor, the state may well have more Republican representatives in the House of Representatives, due to a combination of the larger area of the rural regions + brazen gerrymandering and/or voter suppression laws.
I know I’d certainly rather be living in Queensland than in Texas.
I think the key difference is how we appoint our head of executive.
As I understand it, this is state by state in the US isn’t it? Which means that if a majority of Texans vote for a particular president all of Texas’ college votes go to that president?
Our head of executive (PM) is not directly elected but instead is nominated by the party that controls the HoR meaning Qld’s rural electorates not only contribute members to the HoR, they often contribute heavily to the choice of who is PM.
One surprising statistic is that the population of Australia is more urban than the U.S. Australians are 9.4% rural, while the people of the U.S. are 15.1% rural. Australians are nearly as urban as the people of the U.K., who are 8.9% rural. How can this be true, you may wonder? Doesn’t most of Australia consist of land where few people live? Exactly, few people live in the rural areas there, while there are more rural areas in the U.S. where significant numbers of people live.
That is correct for most states in the USA, with the exception of two of them. So in 48 states, it doesn’t matter if a candidate wins [50% + 1] votes or 100% of the votes, they still get all of that state’s electoral college votes. In two states, Maine and Nebraska, two electoral votes are allocated to the popular vote winner in that state, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each Congressional district (2 in Maine, 3 in Nebraska).
Which means if a candidate wins the popular vote in the big states by razor-thin margins, but loses the popular vote in the small and medium states by landslides, they can still win the Presidency even while losing the overall popular vote, because winning a majority in the electoral college is what actually counts for obtaining the Presidency, based on the rules set by the U.S. Constitution. This happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.
In my opinion, the electoral college is an antiquated and undemocratic system, and ought to be abolished or reformed, but fat chance of that ever happening because it primarily benefits the Republican party, who will never provide the votes needed to do so.
Yikes, that does sound unbalanced. Although if the USA had that system in place in 2016, most likely the Republican party would’ve nominated a more qualified and moderate candidate (before the party took a hard turn to the right following the election of Trump), and history would have unfolded much differently.
So maybe Australia’s system isn’t so bad after all, in this age of disinformation and foreign meddling in elections.
