The Benefits of Farm Programs: Incidence, Shifting, and Dissipation

I write as one who has spent half his career inside and half outside agricultural economics. That makes me less familiar than many agricultural economists with the details of farm programs, and this will be the kind of treatment where you cannot see the trees for the forest. What I had in mind when I undertook this inquiry into farm programs is that, like a man from Mars, I may be able to contribute something useful with an outsider’s perspective. At the same time, as a land economist who has studied the southward movement of subsidized California water to irrigate subsidized cotton developed by subsidized research to replace eastern lands idled by public expenditures, I have some feel for the tensions and contradictions of that set of random programs, agencies, and appropriations which we laughingly refer to as a farm policy.