“Look: cereal costs more than beef, even though cattle eat grain,” my dad said.

I was seven and a half, more interested in enjoying our supermarket excursion (chances to accompany Dad on his grocery runs diminished sharply when elementary school began) than in deciphering his reference to the imbalance in food prices driven by government subsidies.  As far as I could tell, cows ate grass — and there wasn’t a scrap of grass (or, in retrospect, anything natural at all) in my Count Chocula.

But many years later, I heard the startling claim that “the government pays dairy farmers to pour milk down the drain,” and I revisited the topic of agricultural subsidies.

While images of dairymen hauling brimming buckets of milk from cow to gutter seem ludicrous, they effectively cartoon the flaws of U.S. farm policy.  Since the Great Depression, the U.S. has helped farmers manage the risks of farming (drought, flood, fluctuating market prices), so that America’s bread basket would continue to flourish and the country would not become dependent on imported food.  At first pass, this literally meant paying farmers to dump milk (or destroy crops, or slaughter livestock) when a surplus was anticipated.  Today, farm policies have grown into a complex subsidy network that costs more than $16 billion each year.

Any politician worth his votes will tell you these policies are designed to keep the small farmer in business.  They include insurance to cover the value of a crop in case of natural disaster, and promises to buy up leftover crops in the event of market failure.

Yet since the government began trying to level the agricultural playing field, the fraction of Americans who farm has dropped from one in four to one in fifty, while the average farm size has more than doubled.

The reasons for this are primarily technological — though they’re exacerbated by subsidies — and center around the Green Revolution, a miracle of crop breeding and innovation that allowed us to double (or even triple) crop yields per unit area.  The cornerstone of the Green Revolution is its suite of hybrid crop varieties, high-yielding plants grown in vast monocultures.  These single-variety plantings are nourished by massive inputs of fertilizer and water, protected by heavy doses of pesticides, and most efficiently reared and harvested when the labor of man is replaced by the labor of machine.

But intensive farming is also financially intensive, so only large farms have enough capital to purchase (and efficiently use) heavy equipment and costly inputs.  Thus, many mom-and-pop farmers have been squeezed out of agriculture, their land amalgamated into mega-farms big enough to give modern tractors room to roam.

Subsidies also serve the big farmer more than the small.  Many farmers grow government-subsidized crops because they are guaranteed a payout even if their crop fails; thus, subsidies actually boost supply, glutting the market and shrinking profit margins.  But for a farmer with 100 times the acreage as his neighbor, even a slim margin produces 100 times the profits, and he might just squeak by while his small-scale neighbor goes belly-up.

The pattern’s results show in today’s data.  10 percent of U.S. farms receive 76 percent of subsidy payments, while 62 percent of farmers see not a penny (subsidized crops make up only 36 percent of the U.S.’s total production).  Wheat, corn, soybean, rice, and cotton-growers collect 90 percent of the subsidies, while fruit-and-veggie farmers labor unsupported.

And, because much of our grain crop goes to feed livestock, most of the $5.5 billion we paid corn and soybean growers in 2009 can get tacked onto the $1.3 billion dairy farmers and livestock ranchers received directly.

So it’s no surprise that a pound of beef is so cheap: agricultural subsidies are finding their way through the farming system and, ultimately, to our waistlines.  The average 18-year-old today weighs 15 lbs more than his or her parents did at that age 30 years ago.  Yet, at a time when most Americans should be trying to slim down, our tax dollars are propping up an industry that’s keeping us fat.

After accounting for inflation, a comparison of food prices over that same 30-year timespan shows that, while the cost of soda, steak, and sweets has fallen, fruit and vegetable prices have risen by an incredible 40 percent.  All because, seventy years ago, we decided our farmers couldn’t lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, many of them still are.  And, while they know that changes may be painful, they are joining the clamor for reform.  The Farm Bill — which carries the authority for many of our subsidy programs — is up for renewal next year and, in this time of fiscal crisis, the Obama administration has proposed a $5 billion cut over ten years — and a restructuring to focus subsidy distribution on lower-income farmers.  But this is a drop in the bucket and — like the 1996 Farm Bill, which attempted to reform and even phase out many subsidies, but was supplanted a few years later — unlikely to really take hold.

More powerful, though, might be a growing grass-roots movement: our grass-roots movement.  In a country where overproduction and overconsumption have become the norm, many of us are responding to a growing sense of discontent.  We crave fresh tomatoes instead of french fries; we often buy organic food at farmers’ markets; sometimes, we even return to the land ourselves.

Given the fundamental reliance of the Green Revolution on fossil fuels (to produce fertilizer, to run machinery, etc.), and the negative impacts of industrialized farming on our environment, the time is ripe for us to look beyond the pail, beyond the field, and beyond the norm, to a new paradigm for American agriculture.  Restructuring and, ultimately, reducing our agricultural subsidies will reward innovation instead of promoting centralization and focus on just a few government-backed crops.  And ultimately, it may lead to better health for all Americans.

 

Did you know this column’s title was a pun?  Neither did I — thanks TallTom and friends!  Send feedback and witty title suggestions to Holly at [email protected]