Harvest of subsidies
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By Jeff DeMoss
Standard-Examiner staff
jdemoss@standard.net
Some say Utah farms would die without commodities; others say supply and demand should dictate prices
BRIGHAM CITY --Following in the footsteps of their father, Richard Grover and his brother raise mostly wheat on 10,000 acres near Snowville and in the Pocatello Valley of southern Idaho.
They have coaxed a good living over the years from their amber waves of grain, but Grover, a third-generation Utah farmer, said there have been times when their farm and neighboring farms would have dried up and blown away if not for the financial support of the federal government.
"In the good years, you can make it on your own," Grover said, "but throw in a couple of bad drought years and it's pretty much over for most farmers if they can't get help."
Utah has a proud agricultural heritage, but it is relatively small as a farming state. Utah farmers received just $41 million of the $21 billion in farm subsidies the federal government dished out in 2005 for disaster relief, land conservation and production of certain crops.
Farm subsidies, created in the 1930s to alleviate the devastating effects of the Great Depression, are a controversial topic today.
Some critics call them free handouts, while those receiving them say the funding is necessary to preserve the waning presence of agriculture in the United States.
"Subsidy has become a catchall phrase with a negative connotation, but it's ultimately consumers that benefit," said Larry Lewis, spokesman for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. "These programs help keep the cost of food down."
Farmers are getting nearly the same prices for some crops that they received 30 years ago without adjusting for inflation, said Rep. Ben Ferry, R-Corinne, whose family has farmed in Box Elder County since 1898.
"Those who are in agriculture have to be more efficient and productive to be able to survive today," Ferry said.
Disaster relief accounts for the largest portion of subsidies in Utah, followed by the USDA Conservation Reserve Program.
Under the conservation program, farmers set aside part of their land and agree to avoid farming on it, the idea being to stop erosion and restore the land to natural habitat. In return, the government pays the farmers a portion of what they would have earned if they had farmed the land.
The program has come under fire from those who say it amounts to paying farmers for doing nothing, but Grover said it helps strike an important balance between maintaining open green spaces and helping family farms survive.
"People hear that the government pays us to not plant the ground and not work, but that's really not it at all," Grover said. "It takes land out of production that you used to make money off by raising crops."
Other subsidies in Utah are used for growing wheat, corn and barley, raising livestock and preserving wetlands.
Subsidies have come under increased scrutiny in recent years, due in part to a Web site, www.ewg.org:16080/farm, that lists the names of individual farms and how much they receive.
The online database, maintained by the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group, has drawn new attention to subsidy payments and made some farmers in the top agricultural states targets of criticism.
The group compiles U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics and organizes the data by state, county, type of agricultural activity and other categories. It includes information about all of the more than 12,000 farms in Utah that have received federal assistance since 1995.
"We decided to shed some light on these very complicated commodity programs that get billions of taxpayer dollars every year," said Michelle Perez, the group's senior analyst. "We just want to pose questions to the public by showing them the data."
Perez said the group sometimes hears from disgruntled farmers who feel they're being picked on, but more complaints come from those who want to be listed on the site.
"Only one in four farmers nationwide benefits from these programs, usually because they grow something that doesn't qualify," she said.
The vast majority of commodity payments nationwide go to growers of five crops -- corn, wheat, soybeans, rice and cotton.
The EWG Web site creates a misperception that farmers are on welfare, said Kerry Gibson, co-owner of Gibson's Green Acres dairy farm in western Weber County.
"The federal government comes up with regulations that farmers have to spend millions to comply with," said Gibson, who also represents District 6 in the Utah House of Representatives.
"How can you consider it a subsidy when the government gives an unfunded mandate and then later realizes it is destroying the nation's food supply by putting farms out of business?"
From 1995 to 2005, Utah, with subsidy payments totaling $380 million, ranked 38th among all states. Top of Utah farmers received $161.5 million, or 42.5 percent of the statewide total.
With $11.2 million in subsidy payments in 2005, Box Elder County was the largest recipient in Utah, accounting for more than 27 percent of payments statewide.
Efforts are under way in Congress to reform the subsidy system. As currently written, the 2007 farm bill would lower the farm income limit to qualify for subsidies from $2.5 million to $200,000.
The relatively small size and family-owned status of most farms in the state means most local crop and livestock growers will still qualify, Lewis said.
"If anything, it will benefit Utah," he said.
Arthur Douglas, who grows wheat on about 5,000 acres near Howell and is president of the Utah Farmers Union, said subsidies play a key role in national security by helping U.S. farmers stay competitive with other countries.
"I hope the day never comes when we're as dependent on foreign countries for food as we are for oil," Douglas said.
Despite the billions of dollars each year, the U.S. is at the bottom of the pile in terms of government subsidies to farmers, Gibson said.
But while they help farmers hold their tenuous grip on the land, subsidies can also be a double-edged sword, Ferry said.
His family farm includes a cattle feedlot, and large subsidies given to corn growers to supply crops for ethanol production have driven the price of corn used to feed cows from about $3 a bushel to between $5 and $6 a bushel.
"What's good for one side of the industry is detrimental to the other side," he said.
Gibson said the best policy would be to do away with subsidies altogether and allow the market to dictate what prices farmers receive for their crops, rather than having the government set prices to keep food costs down for consumers.
"We could do that if the government would stay out of the pricing game altogether," he said.
"Supply and demand works just fine."
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