tejanarusa @ 98

Betsy, thanks!
readeroftealeaves-
[I’ learned more about how farming works. All of it completely irrational, yet apparently unstoppable. Sad.

It would be completely rational if someone took a couple weeks to clear their schedule, focus on this issue, and remain focused on it.

And then align OTHER AGENCIES around the food supply.

You can survive without roads.
You can survive without Stealth bombers and high tech weapons.
You can even survive without urban planning.

Without food, you’re a goner.

You’d think that a nation as ’smart’ as ours would START with the food supply, connect that to public health, then connect that to education (much of medicine, biotech, and a lot of math actually comes out of farming)…

All it would take is interest, focus, and commitment.

But then, Oregon wheat growers, Idaho spud producers, Washington beet groweres, and Montana lentil producers aren’t perhaps exactly in the Abramoff and Norquist level of swank lobbying in D.C.

Hmmmm… who’s a congressperson going to spend time with? Mr Big Bucks Telecom, or my local dairy producers who are burning equity as they try to run a viable business?

This nation is blindly idiotic, and we’ll pay for our greed and stupidity — unless we clean up our act. It would take clear thinking, clear storytelling, and passion. But once you encounter the people in the ag sector, the passion comes pretty easy once you see what they’re up against.

It’s mind boggling.

Very EPU’d. What you, tejanarusa, and others have said here.
Please read “Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” by Jared Diamond (ISBN 0-713-99286-7) and connect for consequences even more unimaginable considering the enormous complexities involved. (It may be the fact of complexity of a system that acts to obscure the reality of need for change to the system for those living in the system. Just a thought.).

If not welfare, what would you call “price supports”?

Um, uh, er, maybe uh kickbacks?

Betsy, thanks!
readeroftealeaves-
[I’ learned more about how farming works. All of it completely irrational, yet apparently unstoppable. Sad.

It would be completely rational if someone took a couple weeks to clear their schedule, focus on this issue, and remain focused on it.

And then align OTHER AGENCIES around the food supply.

You can survive without roads.
You can survive without Stealth bombers and high tech weapons.
You can even survive without urban planning.

Without food, you’re a goner.

You’d think that a nation as ’smart’ as ours would START with the food supply, connect that to public health, then connect that to education (much of medicine, biotech, and a lot of math actually comes out of farming)…

All it would take is interest, focus, and commitment.

But then, Oregon wheat growers, Idaho spud producers, Washington beet groweres, and Montana lentil producers aren’t perhaps exactly in the Abramoff and Norquist level of swank lobbying in D.C.

Hmmmm… who’s a congressperson going to spend time with? Mr Big Bucks Telecom, or my local dairy producers who are burning equity as they try to run a viable business?

This nation is blindly idiotic, and we’ll pay for our greed and stupidity — unless we clean up our act. It would take clear thinking, clear storytelling, and passion. But once you encounter the people in the ag sector, the passion comes pretty easy once you see what they’re up against.

It’s mind boggling.

good evening friends.

The Farm Bill is Insufficient

What’s more, subsidies are tied to crop production, so the largest 10 percent of subsidy recipients collect 70 percent of all subsidies. While some subsidized farmers collect more than $2 million a year, most subsidized farmers collect less than $200 a month.

…Current farm and food policies also provide little incentive to develop links between local producers and ordinary consumers, such as farmers’ markets, and large institutional purchasers like schools and hospitals.

So take a stand alongside organizations like Oxfam. Reform the Farm Bill. You have about a month to convince congress to do the same.

Bless you for this comment, TexBetsy. Especially the parts that I’ve left inline here. What’s happened to our rural economies, or anyone who wants to farm, really highlights the fact that this administration, and the corrupt munitions corporations, have so completely controlled our government’s priortities, budget decisions, and agenda that a latte will cost $5, but we’ll get to pay taxes for Blackwater contractors to raise hell in Iraq.

If you view US government through the eyes of the rural food producers, it is corrupt beyond what the mind can actually absorb.

And although it’s profoundly tragic and dangerous, it’s maybe not all that surprising that hopelessness translates to high rates of alcoholism and alarming increases in meth use.

When you treat people like sh*t even though they feed you, and your ‘news’ focuses on Britney Spears, or some dead almost-actress, it’s clear you’ve lost your mind entirely.

But Dems have failed to support Ag producers strongly enough. That needs to change — pronto!

all you need to know about the farm bill

vegetables are not included

In the upside-down world of farm programs, California produces twice as much food as any other state, but mostly without crop subsidies because fruits, nuts and vegetables are ineligible. Fresno County alone produces more food than South Dakota, but South Dakota gets more than 10 times as much federal crop money.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…..mp;hw=farm bill&sn=002&sc=464

Wow. Why don’t the California farmers get this out? Or better, why don’t their senators and reps?

Just keep hitting that theme as hard and as often as possible.

The Ag sector of the economy is hugely important, but it’s treated like the seventh stepchild of American governance. In my local area, FEMA is currently ‘revising’ its maps to alter a ‘flood fringe’ area — just so happens that making the flood fringe narrower will allow a brainless mega-developer to put a Wal-Mart within 100 feet of a river that floods every ten years. Farmland is the easiest, cheapest land for predatory developers to buy up. So much for our food supply…

And the dairy farmers who risk losing their flood insurance and livelihoods…? FEMA doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them — and the Ag Dept may as well not even exist, as this is the THIRD time in 8 years that I’ve watched this crap occur in my local area. (Once for an auto dealership, twice for big box retail. Everyone loves cheap bottomland, and the farmers can’t compete economically with car dealers or Wal-Marts.)

US Ag policies (like most federal policies) are incoherent. They are sabotaged by the highway builders (Dept of Transportation) and subdivision/economic development interests (related to Housing and Econ Devel). Many Ag producers also run into problems with the Bureau of Land Management (Dept Interior), and the Energy Dept isn’t exactly helping our food producers (i.e., allowing oil drilling to occur on the ’subsurface’ of range lands is not good for ranchers, to cite only one example).

If you pay around $3.50 for a latte, I can safely reckon that the dairy farmers MAYBE made around $ .30 (yeah, 30 cents!) for the milk in your latte. But probably less.

What’s happened in the ag sector is just appalling. The next (Dem) president needs to figure out how to create coherent Ag policies. It’s a ‘hidden’ problem but extremely serious.

And don’t even get me started on immigration’s implications for Ag… (!).

Bush is interested in globalization and energy markets; too bad he can’t seem to see how either of those might relate to our food supply.

We’ll pay in blood for Iraq, and in hunger and huge price increases for the way we’ve treated our farmers, ranchers, and orchardists like sh*t the past 30 years.

I can tell stories about apple orchardists taking their crops to the Co-op in fall and actually being handed bills for ‘payment due’ on their prior years’ crop. In other words, more than one farmer has actually PAID to feed you.

Bush and Cheney should be impeached solely on the basis of the way that food producers have suffered. It’s absolutely criminal. And every dime higher in the price of fuel (for farm machinery, as well as fertilizers) puts more food producers at risk for going bankrupt.

What’s happened to food producers in this nation is absolutely criminal.

I can’t imagine why anyone who cares about our rural farmers could even stand to be in the same room with either Bush or Cheney, but I suppose that simply shows how frustrating I find the incompetence, incoherence, and inter-agency sabotage that happens in D.C.