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| First of all unlike the welfare recipient, we do work but if you grew up on a farm you already know that. My day yesterday started at 6. Rain had unexpectedly popped up on the radar and electrical problems the night before had left us with a pit full and a truck half full of grain. So after covering things up with a tarp the rest of the morning was spent trying to figure out the problem, calling in an electrician and calling the power company. The day ended at 8 with a plugged bin unload auger that had to be turned out by hand. Are we the only profession that works hard? Absolutely not! Plenty of people work a lot harder than I do every day. Do we work as hard as our fathers and grandfathers did? Also absolutely not. Technology and automation has made this job much less physically demanding than it once was. But we just don't roll out of bed at noon and see what goodies the mailman has left us.
We work in a subsidized industry. I think the roots of that go back to the 30s but this is my 41st crop and that has been the case since I started. There have been many different government programs with their own set of hoops to jump through over the years. Farmer owned reserve, PIK Certs, paid Set a Side, CRP, Crop Insurance, Direct Payments, LDP, ARC, PLC and now tariff payments. Some years I got quite a few dollars, some years nothing. Some years those dollars were just a nice bonus and some years those dollars were the only thing that kept us going for another year. Rather than turn my nose up at these payments I have always tried to educate myself on how they worked and how to best utilize them because these subsidies are indirectly built into many of my costs; most notably land costs.
As to what makes us as an industry so special that we should be subsidized, I assume a stable and relatively cheap food supply is pretty important for the overall stability of the country. | |
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When did the American Farmer become an entitled "welfare mom"?
