The Environmental Working Group’s interactive database lets you look up farm subsidies paid by the USDA. You can get all kinds of information–subsidy payments by county or congressional district, top 100 recipients of subsidies, breakdowns into particular types of payments (conservation, crops, disaster, etc.), and so on. It’s an interesting source of information, given that the Obama administration wants to drastically reduce farm subsidies and we’re likely to see a big argument over what the impact will be on farmers. Some groups argue that mid-sized family farms will be devastated by the loss of price supports. Others point out that subsidy payments are highly concentrated, with the top 20% of recipients getting the overwhelming majority of payments, and that if large industrial operations were forced to compete with family farms on an even playing-field without welfare payments, many of them would go out of business, leading to lower production and higher prices for other producers.
This was a big debate among rural sociologists when I was in grad school, and I guess we may be about to see.
Comments 6
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[...] Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database (via Sociological Images) [...]
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[...] FARM SUBSIDY DATABASE The Environmental Working Group’s interactive database lets you look up farm subsidies paid by the USDA. You can get all kinds of information–subsidy payments by county or congressional district, top 100 recipients of subsidies, breakdowns into particular types of payments (conservation, crops, disaster, etc.), and so on. (….) [...]
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[...] FARM SUBSIDY DATABASE The Environmental Working Group’s interactive database lets you look up farm subsidies paid by the USDA. You can get all kinds of information–subsidy payments by county or congressional district, top 100 recipients of subsidies, breakdowns into particular types of payments (conservation, crops, disaster, etc.), and so on. (….) [...]
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[...] FARM SUBSIDY DATABASE [...]
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Brad Wilson — April 18, 2016
This issue is almost always radically misunderstood, so there are very few accurate sources. 1. First understand that there has never been any need (for 60 years) for farm subsidies, except for the fact that Congress lowered (1953-1995) and eliminated (1996-2018 almost all (nonsubsidy) price floors, such that we usually lose money on farm exports. It's like starting with a living wage, then lowering and eliminating it totally. We should make a profit on farm exports, so lowering price floors has alway been stupid. Econometric studies have strongly supported this (i.e. FAPRI, APAC). 2. Subsidies slow the reductions a little, so they're a weak kind of justice, a bit of a good thing, at least in the short run, but a total waste of money. Still, even with farmers, the low/no price floors have driven most farmers out of business, (black farmers were reduced more than 50% per decade for 4 decades!) We have slightly more of these farmers, thanks to subsidies. 3. So except for sugar, (where price floors are so low we had the lowest prices in history in 2014,) there are no "price supports" since 1996. 4. Farmers have long wanted to totally eliminate subsidies and have fair prices instead. 5. That requires price floors and supply management, since free markets don't work very well at all for these farm crops (Search "lack of price responsiveness" "Daryll E. Ray") 6. The family-sized farms are all in the top 20%, even top 10% if they mostly grow these crops. The bottom half are probably less than 5% the size of a too small 200 acre corn and soybean farm. The bottom 1/3 are, at most, 1%. The bottom 80% are, on average, less than 15%. Click my name for more info.