Michele: very interesting, as usual. Now, let me make sure I'm understanding
all this.
1. "direct government payments" - this is money that actually goes from gov into
farmer hands? Not entitlement stuff (like for lower interest loans) or research
funding or whatever, but outright cash payment? Is this systematic money, or
one-off type money as for disaster relief? I'm a bit confused on this, because I
had thought that the whole point of all the hoopla with the OECD, Canada, US,
etc. was to "reduce" government payments. You know, that free market thing. And
indeed, the OECD figures up through 1995, if memory serves, showed such to be the
case. Have I misunderstood something? What has happened since 1997?
2. If %change in total farm income (incl. gov pay) since 1997 is -1%, then I
take it the gov payments have effectively counterbalanced the loss in commodity
value (yield x price) since 1997? How much of this loss in commodity value was
due to human-induced problems (e.g. Asian crisis; ill-conceived gov policies
promoting hog output etc.) vs. weather (e.g. midwestern drought).
3. How is this loss in farmgate receipts (if I am understanding this correctly)
and gain in gov handouts distributed across farm sizes? Are the gov payments
based on acres? yield? stewardship? Pardon my ignorance, but I have not kept
up with these strategies since the base acreage program was dismantled (or was
supposed to be - was it?).
4. If teeny weeny farms gross $1900/ac and megafarms gross $21/ac (e.g. 2 orders
of magnitude difference??? is this a typo??), is this a function of commodity
type (e.g. strawberries vs. coarse grains)? Any basis in that dataset for
comparing apples with apples (or strawberries and strawberries) across farm
sizes? Any sense of "net" vs. "gross"?
> Can someone explain to me why destroying years of agricultural research
> is a terrorist crime, while destroying billions of years of evolutionary
> research is Progress???????
Love it. Just love it! Ann
>
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