Omaha World-Herald | November 14, 2001 | By Jake Thompson
Stung by reports of big farmers raking in big government subsidies, thousands of America's farmers recently spoke out in a new poll for targeting the payments to medium- and small-sized family farm operations.
But Washington apparently hasn't heard the word yet.
The House avoided the idea when it passed its version of the farm bill last month.
And while Sen. Tom Harkin has taken on the controversial issue by proposing some limits to government checks going to large farming operations, the Iowa Democrat expects a tough fight this afternoon when the Senate Agriculture Committee he heads will take up the proposal for a new five-year farm bill. To Chuck Hassebrook, director of the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Neb., the poll reveals an uneasiness he's heard from farmers for years about the size of government checks going out and how they've been used.
"Farmers want them in a way that helps family farms, but not in a way where it subsidizes mega-farmers to drive family farms out of business," Hassebrook said this week. "They wonder, 'Why are we spending money to depopulate rural America?'"
Sen. Ben Nelson, a member of the Agriculture Committee, said Tuesday he hadn't decided on whether he'd support directing payments to small and medium farms. But the Nebraska Democrat added, "I don't think that supporting mega-farms is what the American people would want us to do with farm programs."
America's farmers seem clear on the issue. The nonprofit Farm Foundation released a survey showing 81 percent of farmers favor targeting government subsidies to small and medium farms.
Eighty-five percent of Nebraskans and 75 percent of Iowans supported targeting the subsidies, which are mainly paid to farmers who grow wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, rice and cotton.
The nonprofit foundation sent random surveys to about 70,000 farmers in 27 states and received 14,183 responses, including several thousand from Nebraska and Iowa.
Earlier this year, the General Accounting Office reported that the nation's largest farms have won the lion's share of government subsidies, especially in the last four years as Congress has approved emergency bailout packages of billions of dollars to farmers and ranchers.
The GAO found that farms with sales greater than $ 500,000 a year took in 22 percent of government payments in 1999. And farms with sales between $ 250,000 and $ 500,000 received 21 percent of the payments, the GAO found.
Defenders of the payment system say that large farms produce most of the nation's agricultural goods and that many of them support extended families. They point to census figures showing that in the United States, 8.4 percent of the nation's roughly two million farms sell more than $ 100,000 in agriculture products nationally. They also sell 72 percent of the nation's total agricultural products.
Mary Kay Thatcher, a lobbyist for the Farm Bureau, said she doesn't think there's much support among Farm Bureau members for limiting payments to large operations.
The subsidies, along with the emergency aid packages, have meant a lot in recent years to farmers' survival. Government payments have risen to the point where 40 percent of farmers' net income came from Washington. That's a steep rise from 1989, when federal subsidies contributed just 24 percent of farmers' net income, said Brad Luben, one of the authors of the Farm Foundation survey.
The House proposed capping several subsidies at $ 250,000 a year, but didn't limit the largest direct payments farmers receive.
Harkin proposes sharp cutbacks in payments to large farmers, in part to provide more money for conservation programs he'd like expanded.
He wants subsidy checks limited so that no single farmer can receive more than about $ 180,000 from three main subsidy programs. Yet a number of Republicans on the agriculture committee are expected to fight to kill Harkin's effort.
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