Farm subsidies are federal agricultural programs that, in the account given on The Bob Zadek Show, cost United States taxpayers at least $25 billion a year and primarily benefit wealthy corporate landowners and large agribusiness rather than the small family farms politicians claim to be helping. The topic was treated at length in a 2011 episode featuring Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, and touched on later that year in a conversation with Gary Johnson.
Scale and beneficiaries
Bob Zadek opened the discussion by noting that residents of Sausalito, the upscale Marin County community where he lives, received $717,000 in farm subsidies from 1995 to 2006, a figure he used to illustrate that the program reaches far beyond working farms Farming Subsidies (2011). He described farm subsidies as a federal program that is out of control, costs $25 billion a year, and benefits nobody except Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. He repeated the $25 billion figure throughout the episode, calling it a program that could be slashed from the federal budget on 24 hours’ notice without harming a soul except for the president of Archer Daniels Midland, the president of Cargill, and some super-rich domestic Cuban sugar growers in the Everglades.
Edwards agreed that much of what the federal government does includes subsidies to wealthy people, and said studies of the overall distribution of federal spending show benefits are distributed across the board rather than concentrated on the poor. He cited the sugar program and the milk program as examples: import barriers and domestic monopoly quotas on sugar and milk benefit producers and harm average consumers who eat sugar in breakfast cereals and candy. In Edwards’s account, farm programs harm poor people rather than helping them.
A caller from Arkansas, identified as Mickey and described as an agricultural landlord, told Zadek he could not defend the subsidies. Edwards said the exchange confirmed his argument: the caller was a fairly well-off farmer and landlord who received the money, did not really need it, and would continue farming with his tenant even without the subsidy.
Land prices and young farmers
Zadek raised the irony that a family farmer who wants to buy land on which to grow crops finds land prices inflated by the subsidy, making the land unaffordable. Edwards agreed, saying new young farmers are the ones really hurt by the policy because land has become so expensive that they either cannot buy it, must go massively into debt, or must become tenant farmers. In his view the policies do not help the traditional small farm-owning family that politicians claim to be helping.
Environmental and political dynamics
Edwards argued that farm subsidies are bad for the environment as well as the economy. He said they induce farmers to farm marginal farmland that should be left as forest land or wetlands, and to overuse fertilizer because that is required when farming marginal land. He noted that environmentalists have never liked farm subsidies either, and expressed amazement at the power of lobby groups that can sustain programs opposed across the political spectrum.
Part of the explanation, Edwards said, is that farm subsidies are grouped into a broader bill that also provides food subsidies urban America likes, such as the school lunch and food stamp programs, so that liberal urban legislators vote for the overall bill alongside senators supporting rural farming interests. Zadek pressed the same point politically, asking why Senator Chuck Schumer of New York does not object, given that New York receives 1% of farm subsidies and is a net payer, and that his urban constituents foot the bill. Zadek also speculated that if Iowa were not the first primary state, the farm lobby would not be as strong.
The New Zealand example
Asked what would happen if the $25 billion were cut entirely, Edwards said now would be a good time to phase out farm subsidies because food and crop prices are generally very high and farmers have done extremely well over the previous five or 10 years, with average farm incomes about a third higher than average United States household incomes. He cited New Zealand in the early 1980s, when a left-of-center Labor government facing budget troubles completely abolished farm subsidies. Farmers marched in the streets with placards, but the government stuck to its position. Edwards said New Zealand farmers diversified their land use and moved to higher-value crops, and are now militantly against subsidies and government help. He predicted similar adjustment in the United States, with farmers planting different crops and operating more efficiently.
Ethanol, sugar and obesity
Edwards described ethanol as a related and disastrous policy, subsidies for rural America foisted on everyone else through higher prices at the pump and inflated food prices, and said the same negative economic effects appear across subsidy programs. Zadek framed farm subsidies as an entitlement to the wealthiest corporations, asking whether it was an exaggeration to call it an entitlement to Cargill; Edwards said that was absolutely right.
Zadek also linked the subsidy program to obesity, arguing that it subsidizes only a few crops — sugar, corn, soy and wheat — and not fruits, vegetables or beef, so that the program subsidizes food that makes children fat while the First Lady campaigns against childhood obesity and PTA bake sales. He called the juxtaposition absurd and hypocritical.
Across episodes
The topic appears in the 2011 episode with Chris Edwards and again in the later 2011 conversation with Gary Johnson. Johnson, asked about ethanol and the environment, advocated that farm subsidies be cut by 43% and that ethanol not be subsidized, on the ground that ethanol takes more energy to produce than it produces. He also raised corn sweetener as a possible leading cause of obesity in America. Zadek’s framing in that episode was consistent with the earlier one: he described the government as picking economic winners and losers and referred to the corporate welfare of giving money to Archer Daniels Midland and other large corporations to promote the uneconomic use of corn for fuel Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011). The excerpts show no development in the argument between the two treatments, only the addition of a specific proposed cut and the obesity angle.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not identify the statutes or bill numbers that authorize farm subsidies, nor the committees or votes by which they are enacted. They do not state the total number of subsidized crops beyond the several named, nor the precise mechanics of the sugar and milk quota programs. They also do not report any outcome of the budget debates the speakers anticipated, or whether the proposed cuts were ever made.