I started farming three years ago after quitting my job as a manager for a small store. I never liked working for an employer and I have PTSD that I was diagnosed with in the Air Force and still struggle with today. I minored in climate change studies after the Air Force and that got me interested in becoming a farmer as I met new people and sought different ways of living. I didn’t drive a car and I didn’t get on any kind of aircraft for about a decade because I found things like the voluntary simplicity movement attractive and fitting after working with various fuels in the Air Force. Although I am critical of the military in many ways I acquired a lot of good skills in the Air Force and I still use many of the methods of learning and applying knowledge I acquired during my time in the service. Over the years I’ve known a lot of veterans and families who are struggling with getting enough food to eat and that is why I am a passionate supporter of SNAP. When I sell vegetables at my local farmer’s market people can use their SNAP card to buy food so I’ve met a lot of people with SNAP over the last three years.
It never made sense to me to attach conditions for receiving SNAP such as work requirements or drug tests because I know for a fact that there are people who receive crop subsidies even though they are not farmers and have likely never worked or set foot on a farm in their life. There was an excellent article about this in the New York Times back in 2013. I want to share some highlights here because our government regularly hands money to people who do not produce food and do not need the crop subsidies while criminalizing the poor for trying to get enough food to eat. Here's the article, and here are some highlights below:
The federal government paid $11.3 million in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies from 1995 to 2012 to 50 billionaires or businesses in which they have some form of ownership, according to a report released Thursday by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based research organization…
The Working Group said its findings were likely to underestimate the total farm subsidies that went to the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list because many of them also received crop insurance subsidies. Federal law prohibits the disclosure of the names of individuals who get crop insurance subsidies, the group said…
According to the Working Group’s analysis, more than 40 billionaires own properties where crops are grown that are among the most likely to be insured through the federal program, including corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and sorghum.
Some of the company officials identified by the Working Group said they were surprised to find their names in the report.
Don Millican, the chief financial officer at the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company in Tulsa, Okla., which is owned by the oil and banking magnate George Kaiser, said he did not know why the company was shown as receiving crop subsidies.
The Working Group report shows the oil company received about $17,500 in subsidies for wheat, sorghum and barley from 1996 to 2003. Forbes puts Mr. Kaiser’s net worth at $10 billion.
At least 50 billionaires or corporations received 11.3 million in crop subsidies, that included such hardworking farmers as Paul Allen, Charles Schwab, and Chick Fillet owner S. Truett Cathy. Then there are at least 40 billionaires on the Forbes list who own properties where they will qualify for crop insurance (those names are not disclosed by the federal government unlike crop subsidies). There is probably some overlap between these. In any case none of these people need the subsidies and none of them derive the majority of their income from farming. It does not matter to them if they have a good harvest and it does not matter to them if their crop fails because they are not dependent on these things to make a living. They will get income from the government no matter what and their wealth makes it unlikely that their farms will be responsive to the market or the community because there is no consequence for failure, poor decision-making, and waste.
My 10 acre farm would be ruined and I would have to fold up shop if I make bad decisions or don’t produce what people in the market want. If there is some kind of freak snowstorm or freezing temperatures and my crops are ruined then I am ruined; if I am wasteful then I will fail. My position is not unique among small organic farmers who are often holding their farms together with bubble gum and bailing twine and operate on a shoestring budget. I try to do as much of the work without fossil fuels as possible and I have a rule that I must justify my use of fossil fuels on my farm in every case. An example of this is when I prepared new beds when I started my farm. I could have used some kind of tiller or even a tractor but I used hand tools to reduce my costs and lower my carbon footprint. Any waste on my farm is put into compost or fed to my worms to make vermicompost. I really have very little waste and I work my farm everyday.
So it is interesting to me that the government is handing money to the idle rich while imposing work requirements and drug tests on poor people who do not have enough food to eat. I would like to invite some people from farm subsidy recipient Charles Schwab to come and do some work with me on my farm. I wonder why they don’t drug test the 50 billionaires who get the crop subsidies. After all, wouldn’t it be more important to ensure that drug use is not a problem on the production side rather than on the consumption side. If a recipient of farm subsidies or crop insurance is an addict it would be far more harmful to society because they could make bad decisions that could ruin their farm and cause their workers to lose their jobs. A billionaire with a drug addiction is likely to do far more harm to people and society than a poor person who lacks basic foods as the billionaire has means to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions.
If a person did have a drug problem it would be better that they had enough food to eat because the stress of not having enough food will likely make them less likely to seek help or get into recovery. If they do get into recovery their chances of success will be much improved if they don’t have to go hungry. Not having enough food will make things worse in terms of their addiction.
There are a variety of reasons that people don’t work that have nothing to do with taking advantage of the system or being lazy. Just being poor is hard work in the United States. If people could get enough food to eat while working a job then perhaps more people could get enough food through employment. The problem is that wages frequently do not cover living expenses and workers are often thrown out of work as business fails or the economy takes a dive.
So much of the focus in the past few decades has been on limiting assistance to the poor while establishing greater barriers to access. Cutting these programs to the bone has left the people of this country vulnerable because we effectively destroyed our capacity on the government level to address these crises. This has been accompanied by relentless propaganda that criminalizes the poor and places all the blame on the failures of the poor individual for their condition. Now so much of our system of food production is in the hands of so few and they are struggling to meet the challenge posed by this virus that prices are likely going to rise which will make it harder for more people to get enough to eat.
While the government basically tells people to go starve there will be efforts to fill the need through local charity and so forth. This will help a great deal but in order to address this problem the government will need to get involved. Ultimately we need changes in our government and we need to develop strong ideas of just what our government should do. That will likely require societal change and cultural change, but that would be the best outcome because the problems of hunger and unemployment are not going away any time soon. The pandemic is exposing the problems in our system of food production and consumption. Therefore, we need to develop a better system for people and make our system of food production more resilient. We can’t throw a bunch of money at people who don’t need it for farm subsidies or crop insurance and we can’t rely on big agribusiness and meatpacking companies to put food on our tables.
We need more production on the local level for the local market by small farmers so that when there are stresses put on the food supply on the national level there are producers who can pick up some of the slack. It is bizarre to see videos of farmers destroying fields of crops while people are going hungry. There is no way anyone could get me to destroy my crops. It is encouraging that more people are growing more of their own food and sharing it with others. I farm in a rural area but I find urban areas to be very underutilized when it comes to food production. I know of farmers who farm in Los Angeles and Detroit and I think it would be a good thing if they got more people into farming in large cities. It can be a really good experience for kids, too. It is things like that which could help produce the kind of changes we need in the future and one of the positives I see possibly coming out of the pandemic. But in the short term we will need to make sure people have enough food and there simply is no substitute for government action to meet the crisis.
We can always expect Republicans to be the fools and ghouls that they are but anyone who calls themselves a Democrat should be held to a very high standard on these issues because there really is no excuse for hunger and certainly no excuse for things like school lunch debt. The fact that the US has so many children who don’t have enough food to eat while it has billionaires on the dole at the same time is a national disgrace that outrages the morality and conscience of anyone who spends any time thinking about it.