Land Ownership and Subsidies

I don't intend for this post to be too much of a political rant - we'll see how I do when we get to the end...

I picked up a copy of Hobby Farms magazine at the library this week. It's the November/December 2005 issue and has an article entitled "Once Upon A Time" by Rick Gush. The article is about the history of small farms. Here is a quote:

Early thugs who wandered among the small farmers discovered that instead of killing small farmers and taking their foodstuffs, they could more cleverly extort regular payments in exchange for the right of small farmers not to be attacked. As generations of thugs used the payments from multiple small farmers to accumulate wealth, they also accumulated the power that made the "right" to collect extortive payments hereditary. As regional identities were born, the extorted payments from small farmers formed the basis of wealth that allowed landowners, nobles, kings and conquerors to rise to power.

This pattern of powerful men deriving their sustenance and their power from the payments of many small farmers is still the basic social phenomenon upon which world societies and politics operate. The ebb and flow of this extortion has measured tha passage of time over the history of small farms. The power that was Rome was originally possible because of the productive farming activities of thousands of small farmers. But by the end of the Roman era, small farmers were practically non-existent in Italy and food was produced principally on huge corporate farms that used millions of slaves captured in military combat.

There are so many parallels to modern times here that it's hard to know where to begin. Our "noblemen" are still taking their "tribute" and using it against us. Here's just one example:

In 2002 (most recent data I could find online), the federal government owned 1.15 billion pounds of nonfat dry milk. My calculator doesn't have enough digits to calculate how much whole wet milk this equates to but it's a lot. A while ago on a friend's blog, a factory farmer (I'm sure she considers hers a "family farm") proudly commented that her farm produced 2 million pounds of milk last year. Given the surplus, this begs the question, "why?!?" This factory farm produced 2 million pounds of milk that nobody wanted to buy and our government, through a middleman, paid them enough money to do the same damned thing again this year.

Meanwhile the Ohio Department of Ag is harassing real family farmers who have sold shares in their cow herds to people who desparately want to drink their own healthy milk. This is insanity and the only cure I can think of is for more and more people to opt out of industrial agriculture. I must admit to being guilty of not engaging politicians and public officials as I should be. As a crunchy con, I find that I have little in common with any mainstream politician. A libertarian once wrote something to the effect that America has two parties - the evil party and the stupid party. Sounds about right to me...