House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed off Friday on a five-year farm bill that would keep multibillion-dollar subsidies flowing to cotton, corn and a handful of other crops, deeply disappointing Bay Area food and environmental activists who had hoped that Congress might shift federal farm policy this year to combat obesity, air and water pollution and industrial farming…. The bill comes during the most prosperous era American agriculture has seen in decades as crop prices and farm income approach or set record highs. (San Francisco Chronicle, Monday)
Cutting subsidies in a profitable year might discourage farming.
FEE Timely Classic
What Do Farmers Want from Me? by Russell Roberts