Posted on 12/05/2001 2:52:29 AM PST by brityank
If we can grow better oranges for a better price, then screw Mexico. I wasn't talking about oranges specifically, only that if another country does it better/cheaper, then economics say it's better to let them do it while we specialize in what we're good it. If the people here are right and we're so bad at farming X that we need subsidies and price supports, then X needs to be imported too.
"We had farms before computers, cars, or electricity."
So there it is. We keep the subsidies and price supports out of a sense of nostalgia for farmers. There will always be enough food, whether domestic or imported -- supply and demand says there will.
Name one mass famine that has occurred in a free democracy with a free press and civil rights.
One of my greatest concerns is that we will lose our capacity to be independent. It is a matter of losing our infrastructure and our skills. Farming and ranching is not something you just go to school and learn. It is a lifestyle that you almost have to be born to. I know a professorof range ecology who bought a ranch and hadn't a clue how to irrigate and do all the on-the-ground things entailed in ranching. We once did an inventory of skills required and it was amazing: chemistry, physics, mechanics, veterinary medicine, bookeeping, sales, management, genetics, etc.
A stable and plentiful food supply PERMITS specialization. Only a very small percentage of the population now farms/ranches leaving the rest of us to specialize in IT or whatever. In the days when everyone had to grow their own and had little surplus to sell, there was little room for specialization. It is only when production of surplus is possible that some can be freed for other things. That is what I meant by farming being our foundation Either we produce raw product or someone else does. You still need raw product to "add value" with service or whatever. Becoming dependent isn't all that you crack it up to be. Look at what dependence on foreign fossil fuel has gotten us into.
Name one free democracy with a free press and civil rights.
We live in a Republic, not a democracy.
You know what I mean. Name one relatively free "society" with good public communications where a mass famine happened. Good luck. Allowing a free market in our farming will not cause a lack of food.
Now this is probably one of the most reasonable things I've read here in a long time.
I don't believe we'll ever move production entirely out of country, and I don't believe allowing free-market farming will make that happen. I would like a balance where I pay for food only what it cost to produce, ship, warehouse and retail it, plus profits.
I don't want to see our farmers fail, but there is a lot of non-profitable dead wood out there that we are supporting. In a free market system rather than our current socialism, I'm sure American ingenuity will win, and there will be profitable farmers still. If anyone can make a profit out of something, it's an American.
However, if we can't seem to make a profit out of something, then import it. There are tariffs and quality regulations to control the imports.
Oranges: seed to commercial crop: 20 years
Oil well: seismic to production:2 years.
All assuming that the infrastructure is in place, that knowledgeable people are available to run these operations.
What you do not seem to realize is that if we all go into IT or some other field which does not directly supply the basics (Food shelter--including energy), clothing, we will depend on the rest of the world for those items.
Disruption of essential shipping is one of the basic wartime strategies of an aggressor nation, effectively laying siege to the defender. We might survive an interruption in the flow of computer chips, even of 55% of our oil supply (current import levels), but not food.
History simply does not bear the assumption that the rest of the world will be happy (or able) to feed us. This has not been a problem in the past because $2.00/bushel wheat in 1950 meant more farmers than $2.00/bushel wheat means today. Agricultural production now is more efficient and cost effective than ever. Subsidies and controls are a way of maintaining that infrastructure for our security as a nation.
But to call grazing leases a subsidy is bunk, that is one of the propaganda lines used by the people who will be taking this land out of production.
I do have faith, however in basic supply and demand. When beef prices go up, the ranchers who survive will be able pay more for the leases, and you (assuming you eat meat) will pay more for beef. Pity that is going to be a 10 year cycle (the term of the leases).
Or are you going to get your meat from one of the countries with BSE in the herds?
If you live there, there will be a dollop more on your tax bill, as land that used to be used to make taxable income and generate sales of durable (and other) goods (taxable transactions) is "saved" from being productive.
...what industry are you in? Does the government directly subsidize your industry (doesn't count contracts for goods and services the government wants)
No the Government does not subsidize my industry, per se. If we count the cost of maintaining a military presence and foreign aid to buy "peace" in the region, oil imported from the Middle east is worth some $200/barrel, domestic oil is worth only about $16 today. So any subsidies hurt the domestic oil exploration industry where I work. (Over half of US production is from independant producers--smaller oil companies, not "big" oil companies.)
Some might call this a subsidy, but the government is not subsidizing oil, it is subsidizing our national security, and our economic security.
Again, Food, shelter, clothing. Without secure sources, we are ripe for the picking.
No, I can't do the spoon bending trick, much less read minds. I read what you wrote.
Name one relatively free "society" with good public communications where a mass famine happened.
I don't pretend to know what you mean by "relatively free" but famine continues in sub Saharan Africa.Public communications have sucked since the Bell network went down, and I'm not sure of their relavance anyway, except to narrow the field.
Allowing a free market in our farming will not cause a lack of food.
Precisely. The environmental groups are not farmers. Imports are not ours. I'm all for a free market in farming. People I know who work 18/7/365 would finally get paid minimum wage for the hours they put in.
That about sums up what I've been saying. Economic theory says we should import if we don't produce efficiently, but I have faith in at least the more enterprising farmers to be able to make it in a free market. Those farmers will be able to feed the nation. The rest can stop sucking up my tax dollars.
I wonder how it shortchanges the state's public school system without accidentally shortchanging the state's tax collection bureaucracy and the salaries of the state legislators as well. I would not have thought that cows were that smart, or that opposed to children.
Basically, does the government pay you or the Saudis to not produce oil to keep prices up? Do they give you an exclusive lease on land at below market value, locking out those would pay fair market value? Do they do any of the other farming tricks like loan guarantees? If not, you're not directly subsidized.
To combine messages:
"No, I can't do the spoon bending trick, much less read minds. I read what you wrote."
You took it literally to mean only oranges. The oranges were only an example of any crop. Oranges were probably not a good example since we're good at making a profit there.
"I don't pretend to know what you mean by "relatively free" but famine continues in sub Saharan Africa."
All modern famine was a direct result of government farming policy or some type of situation where government broke down. For example: China, Russia and Ireland ("potato famine") were the direct result of government policy. Somalia, Ethiopia and much of the rest of Africa were either the result of government breakdown, or famine was being used to starve the enemy.
These days, people don't starve, people are starved.
"I'm all for a free market in farming."
Then let them pay a fair price for their land. It appears they've been in collusion for too long in order to keep prices down and profits up. This was at the direct cost of Arizona school kids.
If someone else is willing to pay a higher price, then they should beat that bid. There's no way the enviro movement will be able to take out all farmland, just small portions of it in certain places. They just can't compete with multi-billion dollar industry.
Like I said, it would be nice if they sunk all their money into conservation efforts such as this instead of lobbying. It should drain the coffers faster and actually benefit real people.
Okay. Lets get a couple things straightened out. We are talking about grazing land. The cattle eat the grass, deposit fertilizer, and move on. In farming, you plant, tend, and harvest your crop. Most grazing land is too rocky, poor, or at an inappropriate angle for farming. Most leased state and federal grazing land is land which was too poor for someone to make the homestead work. Not prime agricultural land. Most jurisdictions are such that no seeding, fertilizing, or irrigation may be done on state or federal land. However, it is sufficient to graze a limited number of cattle, for a limited time, which requires that a lot of it be used, in rotation, to graze any substantial herd.
Cattle Ranching 101.
You must build the herd to levels where calves will provide, at marketable maturity, sufficient income to keep the operation economical. The pleasantly low meat prices which Americans enjoy are the result of tremendous pastureage in the US. Unfortunately, west of the Mississippi River, a great deal of the land is owned by the government--about one half. In some states, more--in Nevada, over 90% of the land is federally owned. This placed the cattle ranchers and the government in a sort of partnership. The government gained revenue from the land by leasing the land as pasture, and in many areas, still does. The rancher gained pasture land, through leasing, which allowed him to increase the size of his herd and keep his operation economically profitable.
The Government, MOST IMPORTANTLY, gained lower food prices on the open market, something which has been essential to keeping the masses happy since the days of Imperial Rome, (bread and circuses). Spin off revenue comes to the Government in the form of fuel, excise, sales, and other taxes which are levied on the incredible number of consumable and durable goods which a ranching operation utilizes.
Falsely terming the leasing of sparse pasture as "subsidizing" ranchers is an error which the environmental groups have willingly perpetrated and perpetuated. The Environmental groups have a multifaceted agenda which includes promoting the following agenda items:
"Rewilding America", the alleged return of the vast majority of the land area to it's "pristine" state. Ridiculous, simply because there were people here thousands of years before European colonization, and the "rewilding" agenda includes closing these areas to people. People have been part of the ecosystem for a long time.
In addition, this portion of the agenda includes the reintroduction of dangerous predators, including, but not limited to the grizzly bear and cougar.
Another portion of the agenda is the removal of meat from people's diet, the PETA/HSUS portion, and one way to achieve this includes attacking ranching so the price of meat goes up.
Other venues of attack include the abuse/use of the Endangered Species Act (as in the Klamath Basin), and use/abuse of any and every other stumbling block which can be trotted out or written into official policy.
This environmental group assault reaches even into firefighting, where in a fire a few years back which burned a swath of prairie some 30 miles by 12 miles,(Eastern Montana and North Dakota) the local BLM rangers would not let private landowners whose land was in an area of intermixed BLM and private ownership travel by road to their ranches to repel or fight the fire. Fortunately, the ranchers knew other routes to their property, beside the ones the BLM had blocked, or they might have had a couple of job openings.
In a nutshell, leasing rangeland with no intention of doing anything but preventing ranchers from utilizing the grass on it as feed, is just another phase of this multifaceted assault.
As for a multibillion dollar industry, yes it is. But like the Great Wall of China, that which you percieve to be megalithic is, in actuality composed of small blocks. Each one of those blocks is a family-owned ranch or farm. Is that farmer/rancher a millionaire? Perhaps, if you add up the value of all the land (much passed down through generations) and equipment, livestock, etc. Cash flow, however, is another item, as that wealth is tied up in the means of production. The whole Ag industry megalith as a structure is too large to attack, so the attack is localized, one or two bricks at a time.
The eventual result will be, if this continues unchecked, that megacorporations like Monsanto, Conagra, or Cargill will control food production in the US, after they buy the little operations up at auction. Hormel, Tyson and Armour already control a substantial portion of the meat market.
Eventually you will pay more, a lot more, for food.
In my industry, the oil industry, we are not subsidized, it is actually the reverse. Huge sums of government money are spent each year to keep prices down. Ceaser lived in a fairly temperate climate and energy costs were not a concern.
Add up the cost of the Gulf War, which was about maintaining low fuel prices (by keeping Saddam from siezing Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil fields). Democracy schmemocracy. Kuwait was and is an Emirate.
One last thing, although there were political/religious factors involved in the Irish Potato Famine, there was a blight which destroyed the potato crops. The British figured it was more expedient to let a bunch of 'Mick mackeral-smackers' starve.
If this also has the effect of knocking down another subsidy, I'm also all for it. No matter how much you whitewash it, providing land for under market value to ranchers is a subsidy. However, the ranchers should be compensated for any property improvements if they lose the lease.
Aside from all of that, just reading the article tells me these people aren't worried about facts and free market, only their own interest. For example:
Many ranchers say the new rules are akin to turning owner-occupied homes into rental units with high turnover - the short-term tenants won't be good stewards of the land.
The only reason the environuts want the land is to take care of it.
"These plants have evolved over the last 100,000 or 200,000 years with grazing," Chilton said. "We have all kinds of evidence that horses, camel, bison, mammoth and other grazing animals have been on the land for eons."
And the wild animals ate and moved on, letting things grow again. Don't tell me that none of the ranchers ever overgrazed their plots.
called the ruling "a risky new precedent" that could "seriously harm the income generated from trust lands for the schools of this state."
The only way the environuts will get the land is to outbid the ranchers. Logically, this equals more money for the schools.
With these ranchers spouting lies this much, I don't much trust anything they say about how devastating the effects will be. I trust more the PERC mentioned in the article, since they think more like I (and I'm pretty sure you) do: let money instead of regulation do the talking to save the environment.
What, are they going to go out there and eat the grass which will otherwise die and lay there? As if the ranchers have not taken care of the land. Remember, the land is their means of production--Not in some get-rich-quick scheme, but has continued to be their means of production for generations. You simply do not farm or ranch land you abuse for generations, your land will go fallow, your pasture will be stripped, and you will go out of business.
The concepts of crop rotation in farming, and grazing rotation in ranching have been around a long time. You rotate crops to give the land a "rest" and to fix nitrogen. You rotate pastures to keep the herd from overgrazing. This requires site-specific knowledge, frequently updated. This is why the fences and watering sites are necessary to wise range use, so pastures can be isolated, and the herd moved to fresh forage as the browse begins to be depleted.
Are the environmentalists going to inspect this land anywhere near as often as the ranchers do , over ten years? I really doubt it. They will sit in some air-conditioned enclave far away and get bursitis from patteing themselves on the back for "saving" this land, while noxious weeds take over.
"These plants have evolved over the last 100,000 or 200,000 years with grazing," Chilton said. "We have all kinds of evidence that horses, camel, bison, mammoth and other grazing animals have been on the land for eons."
And the wild animals ate and moved on, letting things grow again. Don't tell me that none of the ranchers ever overgrazed their plots.
Sure, some FORMER ranchers let their herds overgraze.....
called the ruling "a risky new precedent" that could "seriously harm the income generated from trust lands for the schools of this state."
The only way the environuts will get the land is to outbid the ranchers. Logically, this equals more money for the schools.
If the environuts outbid the ranchers by $0.10 per acre, the state gets $5000.00 more from leasing 50,000 acres. Then the state loses the fuel, income, land, excise, and vehicle taxes, registrations, etc. Is the state going to come out ahead? No way.
If the ranches of the state of Arizona go under, then in 10 years, the environuts move on. In the meantime, the ranches' assets have been sold/auctioned off, the herds are gone or are owned by one of the majors like Hormel, and the environuts move on to attack the industry somewhere else.
The land is in worse shape, the state suffers a net revenue loss, and there is less competition in the meat market.
I fail to see the benefits of this to anyone, unless they have somehow embraced the environut agenda and wish to end ranching at all costs. This only furthers that end.
1) If environmental groups are allowed to lease the land in competition with ranchers/farmers then also make the massive areas of government land available to ranchers and farmers to compete with environmentalists to work. Open up all BLM lands for fair market bidding.
2) The subsidies in part offset over-reaching taxation policies on land valuation. Most of the lands discussed are worth less than $40/acre, $26/acre isn't too unreasonable. Many land owners are taxed at 2% annually or in this case between $0.52 to $0.80/acre. But many ranches are assessed at closer to $100-$2000/acre following suburban valuation methods inhrant in the codified nature of the Land Division Act.Since the number of suburbanite voters greatly exceeds those of ranchers, the laws tend to favor assessment interpretations by those outside ranching/farming industries. Assessing property 30 miles from nowhere within the same county as properties being assessed using metropolitan and suburban codes is unjust to rural owners.
The market isn't as evenly or openly balanced as implied. In this case I would argue subsidies might be more efficient methods to address conflicting interests equitably.
No, not a ranch, but I've seen the destruction of public lands from over-grazing out West.
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