Let's add agriculture subsidies to the long list of things that pgabs wants to discuss but knows nothing about.
While Texas is A leading agriculture state, it is not THE leading agriculture state. https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17844
Using over half of our crops to feed animals is a problem. I think it's over a 10 to 1 ratio on crops per pound of meat (water consumption with this formula is also a huge problem).
And a lot aren't poor and southern. I stand corrected. I should have checked the Texas claim, i thought i remembered learning that in HS but California is so far ahead i doubt it was correct then Edit: Texas is first in cotton, i think that always stood out to me
the top 10 agricultural producing States in terms of cash receipts were (in descending order): California, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana.
The whole world subsidizes agriculture. If you value having the ability to produce food products in your country, you basically have to subsidize agriculture. It's even written into the GATT/WTO. Everyone recognizes the need to subsidize. Now we can do a better job in how we structure our subsidies. And we can better regulate how farms are run and managed. There's a lot of political nonsense written into the farm bill. But to suggest that we should just abandon subsidies will utterly ruin the agriculture sector.
Learned this at UofH for those who wanna verify. The discovery of America and production of its wheat drove wheat prices very far down in the early years
If there is a 'need to subsidize' it is only because the other countries you compete against in international markets subsidize. To not subsidize puts you at a disadvantage. But, I don't believe a market for food commodities can't works without subsidies or, like @pgabriel is saying, that we can't have a secure food supply without subsidies.
We spent decades at various GATT conferences arguing about this. No country is voluntarily dropping subsidies. Plus you have to realize how boom and bust farms are. That's one of the main reasons why subsidies were originally introduced. The free market actually works quite terribly at times for farmers and if you want consistently priced food, you basically have to subsidize to limit the huge fluctuations in prices. As an example, in an overly strong year for crops, farmers can oversupply the market and actually bankrupt themselves because yields on crops are just too low. So either you legalize OPEC style agriculture collusion so farmers can jointly set the market price or you create subsidized price floors. In some years, farmers can see 70% crop failure. That's bankruptcy range for some farmers and that has downstream implications on food prices as well. Agriculture is like other industries that don't work very well in the free market. You can certainly try it but it comes with societal costs that no one is ready to accept. If we don't subsidize, then you have to let farmers and ranchers start to collude to create market stability. The inherent lack of stability from year to year in agriculture lends itself to either massive market failures or some sort of external factor like collusion or subsidies.
The more the merrier. As geeimsobored argues it's more about securing price but i tend not to take it for granted even in today's age
The obesity problem stems from what is subsidized. The corn lobby. But from a diabetic perspective corn is still a good staple crop Edit: as far as corn wheat rice and potatoes are concerned on the diabetes
Everyone should read what @geeimsobored is saying. The only quibble I have is that any and all agriculture is totally weather dependent on a seasonal basis. Too much rain, too little rain, etc....
