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And there was nothing "condescending" there. I'm saving you from embarrassing yourself. You don't understand how farm practices work, subsidies work, and are jumping to wrong conclusions based on those misconceptions. For example. A dairy farmer doesn't get a subsidy to grow his feed.

He MAY get a payment to NOT grow anything for the commodity market on any remaining airable land not used for his dairy operation.

Therefore he wouldn't be taking any crop into the market, or else he'd have to pay back his subsidy, or go to jail. Or both.

In my area, very few large farm operations own all of their land.

As a general rule, most farms are a small share of their parent’s land, split among the children. Those that chose to remain on the farm then rent large amounts of acreage from their neighbors.

So corn land competes with pasture, soybeans, etc.

Also, because of the corn growing season requires the entire summer, corn can not be double cropped with anything else in the manner of wheat and soybeans, for instance.

You also neglect to mention that hog operations are huge and rarely grow all of their feed. Many grow none.

I have read of several TX cattle feeding operations that have 20,000 cows. That would take a lot of land to grown corn. I have some trouble visualizing a feed lot operator that could run a feedlot with 20,000 cows and at the same time manage the amount of land required to grow all of his feed.

Maybe it is common in TX, but whether it is or not, your comments do not address it.

Chicken feeding operations are similar. Someone else mentioned here that the laws of supply and demand are still operative whether the gummit tries to cancel them out with subsidies or not.

Many compete for corn, but even more interesting is that many more compete for the land required to grow corn.

In my opinion, the really smart farmer will continue to plant whatever crop he has done well with in the past. He already has the equipment, the expertise and the track record in whatever those crops might be.

And corn ethanol is a bubble that will burst, ruining anyone who is into it whole hog.

In my earlier, I stated: “Also, because of the corn growing season requires the entire summer, corn can not be double cropped with anything else in the manner of wheat and soybeans, for instance.”

The conclusion to that statement, which I neglected to include, is that for every acre planted in corn, an acre is lost to both wheat and soybeans.

So plant one acre of corn and lose two acres of food crop.

It is a little more complicated than that, but it makes the point that corn for ethanol has many examples of the law of unintended consequences and we ignore them at our peril.