is the Dems led by Nancy Pelosi - completely sold themselves out to big ag interests.

it was a colossal embarrassment that GW was for once on the right side of the issue while the Democrats looked like morons

Some of us tried. There was one vocal advocate working for a progressive farm group who was utterly unpleasant, tearing up eager politicians on blogs across cyberspace and spitting venom at others (including here at Grist) telling them basically they were too stupid to understand; giving off the superiority air that she was doing us all a huge favor directing her abusive vicious dominance upon us. Ran off a lot of sympathetic supporters with her unnecessary vitriol. She might have had some knowledge (who knows? few could stand to deal with her) but she did herself, her group, and ultimately people all over the world no favors.

I'm all for hearing ideas. I certainly have a few myself and understand so much more now than I did a year ago (thank you Michael, Tom, and Grist, as well as Dan, Curt, Ian and the many behind the scenes). Hoping to be able to get some time with my congressional members to get a better handle for the next round and to make sure the unfunded mandates (trade-offs as they may be) get advocated for each budget cycle.

So far I'm leaning for price supports, re-establishment of solid reserves, and some sort of limits on the amounts of each commodity grown each year with encouragements to alternatives as well as a number of other reforms. Don't imagine the big players who really benefit currently will be all that keen on those possibilities though. What can I say? I don't think the government was meant to be of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.

All in favor of losing your rights, please do nothing

Mr Pollan,

Big fan of your work, and I think on nearly every issue you covered in Omnivore's Dilemma, you were spot on. Except, that is, for your view, elaborated above, regarding the Farm Bill and subsidies in general.

A government large enough to correct the subsidies allocations in whatever way you find appealing is a government large enough to take all that away and revert to some system as wrongheaded as the current one, or perhaps worse. There is a lobbyist problem in D.C. precisely because the federal government is so large. The solution is to remove the incentive for lobbyists to pollute DC in the first place, by removing their reason for lobbying the federal gov't.

I see your points, from your book, that certain subsidies to farmers are a good idea, given that free market principles don't apply very cleanly, given unpredictability of weather.

But why not eliminate all federal subsidies for agriculture, and instead have those states that have a large enough agricultural sector dole out subsidies as needed to farmers in their state? This would keep the relevant decision-making closer to the areas impacted than is currently. Meaning farmers would have more actual involvement in policy making. Wouldn't states with large enough agricultural production see it in their own best interest to have farmers supported, for their state's economy? I don't see why they wouldn't.

And wouldn't a state-level solution keep farmers happy, who were worried that subsidies would have been removed altogether by reform, as you suggest in this article?

kind regards,
Matthew Dallman

I live in Montana and while working on posting property taxes in for our county, I noticed that some "celebrities" with farms taxes were a fraction of what regular hard-working Montanans were having to pay. When I asked about it, I was told that it doesn't matter how much property a celebrity or landowner owns (this can be thousands and even millions of acres), if they can find someone to farm just 40 acres of it, they get a really great break on their property taxes. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a whole lot of cheating to me!

As far as allowing the state's to regulate subsidies, it should be required that the farmer be a resident of the state they are getting the subsidy in. If they had this requirement in the farm bill right now, it would eliminate all of this cheating that is happening.

"For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide, to dispel the misery of the world." - Shantideva