i was watching news channel last night and stumbled on to this informative website.
it occurs to me i am in the wrong business, i am going to have to start planting.
years ago a friend of my wifes was talking about her brother, a farmer, and how he retired at 45. i started asking her questions, how did he retire so young? i thought farmers were struggling just to keep from losing the land?
her response was vague, she said he was a good businessman. after doing a little poking around at this website i think i know why she was being vague. farmers are raking it in, and this website shows exactly who got what. they had to sue to be able to release this public information.
i love this country, just filled with good stuff like this.
Replies
I know nothing about farming and Govt subsidies, but I do know Boss Hog will be here soon to eat you.
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"Thank goodness for the Democrats! If you are terminally unemployable, enjoy living off of govt welfare and feel you owe society nothing you're in luck: there is a donkey waiting for you."
check out that website, corn is one of the top crops for subsidies, if you grow corn not only can you sell it at record prices right now, but then the govt will give you more money for your corn crop. i am fascinated.
apparently it seems that according to the new farm bill a married couple can receive up to $120,000, $60K apiece, in subsidies for their family farm.
this amount is in addition to any profit they may make on the crop, which traditionally has been rather dicey from my limited knowledge of the subject, but last coupla years crop prices have been very good.
i don't think boss will eat me, but if he uses that website he will be able to look up all of his neighbors and find out exactly what they got from USDA as a subsidy. I wonder if boss made the list? boss you collect on any of those farm subsidies?
A lot of it is over my head but it does seem on the surface to be ridiculous..
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"Thank goodness for the Democrats! If you are terminally unemployable, enjoy living off of govt welfare and feel you owe society nothing you're in luck: there is a donkey waiting for you."
Segundo
I went to that site you posted. I went to a county here in Iowa that I know pretty well. I have a cousin and her husband that are on the list for farm subsidies.
They (the husband and wife) both received $32K and some change. That may seam like a lot of money but I know that this couple have in excess of 5000 acre's of farm land! That land has been going up in value at alarming rates. This couple just recently purchased a 240 acre farm at the low sum of $7000 per acre!
Put all that in perspective and the $64K don't seam like all that much money!
Now for the record, I think farm subsidies should be abolished. Why don't they subsides us carpenters when we are down and out? How about he electricians? plumbers?...........on and on. Thats not the only reason that I dont like the subsidies programs but its a good part of it. Seams that the big recipients of those subsidies are large corporate farmers, not the small guy that really needs it. I don't know all the in's and outs of the subsidies so I'm not going to get into to much here regarding it.
My main point here is that most farmers are not receiving the amounts that you think they might be. Small farmers are not getting all that much, if any. Not every farmer receives this money.
I could site you a lot of examples of the ways that people have been able to buy farms and never make a payment on them by putting them in set-aside programs(paid to not farm the land). ten years down the road the program ends and the farm has been paid for by you and me! Nice deal if you can get it!
Doug
i did some looking into it as well and realize that the subsidies don't go to the small farmers.
they go to the big corporate farms more than anything else, those subsidy programs and resource conservation programs (paid not to grow) are very small amounts for small farmers.
if you get 28 cents a bushel for corn, and you are lucky enough to get 150 bushels per acre, and you have 100 acres in corn thats only $4,200.
$42 dollars an acre is not very much, tough to get rich on that but the thing is they still get that $42 an acre even after they sell their corn for record prices. I don't begrudge the farmers one penny of it, its the corporations and people living in manhattan that should get cut out.
I don't begrudge the farmers one penny of it, its the corporations and people living in manhattan that should get cut out.
Exactly. I went back and looked at the county that I grew up in, couldn't count all the people that I knew/were related to that were getting less then $5000.
I know a lot of small farmers that don't care much about the subsidizing, wouldn't mind if it were gone. I know some large operation farms too and they don't seam to say much about it!
Just like anything else, geared for the big corporation!
Doug