Percentages have a funny way of meaning different things in different contexts.
A baseball player who fails to get a hit 70 percent of the time is having an incredible season, while a student who scores 30 percent on a test is in trouble. A politician who garners 60 percent of the vote these days has won in a virtual landslide, but if four out of 10 family members dislike the dish you brought to the 4th of July picnic, you’re probably disappointed.
Some of the statistics concerning agricultural subsidies are similarly paradoxical. For example, the total amount of money in the Farm Bill dedicated to farm programs is about $25 billion per year. This is a lot of money, of course, but it’s just 0.4 percent of the $6.13 trillion the government spent in 2023.
How should we reckon with this number? On the one hand, if our concern is balancing the government’s books and reigning in debt — which it should be, at least to some degree, since the government only collected $4.4 trillion in revenue last year! — then even zeroing out the Farm Bill would do practically nothing. Eliminating the Farm Bill, or doubling or tripling it — none of these would have any significant impact on our government’s overall fiscal solvency.
However, that $25 billion has an enormous, outsized effect on farming practices. Both direct subsidies and crop insurance prop up conventional, monocropping farming systems. They hinder the implementation of regenerative, ecological practices that are more resilient to climatic and market disturbances. By artificially reducing the risk of planting the same few crops, sometimes on marginal lands, they suppress innovation, harm the soil, and — most importantly — lead to ever-worsening human health.
Those are some pretty horrible tradeoffs for a mere 0.4 percent of the federal budget.
But the Farm Bill isn’t going away. That’s a political non-starter. Instead of bemoaning whether, or how, 0.4 percent of the federal budget is being spent, we need to focus on spreading ecological and regenerative principles to those farmers who feel trapped by subsidies and crop insurance and who want to raise healthier food. The examples of the innovators and early adopters of these methods — many of whom have been influenced by this magazine over the years — are now being picked up and followed by the mainstream. The proliferation of media and conferences and even government-produced materials touting soil health and soil biology are an indication that these ideas are on the rise.
Our executive editor, John Kempf, believes that in a decade, growers who are at least experimenting with elements of regenerative agriculture will manage 40 to 60 percent of the world’s farmland. That’s a percentage we should all be optimistic about — and we should devote ourselves to helping make it happen.
And that’s the view from the country.
