NORWICH – Last month, the U.S. Senate fell four votes short of approving an amendment that would have capped large federal subsidies to individual farms at $250,000 annually.
Senators Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sponsored the amendment, meant to be included in the overdue 2007 Farm Bill, to limit million and multi-million payments that go each year to what some argue are already the nation’s wealthiest farms.
According to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics made available by the Environmental Working Group, a public policy organization, in the last 11 years, only 10 percent of the country’s farms – with the majority of the top-20 multi-million dollar recipients located the south – are receiving the bulk of federal money: $120.5 billion of the total $164.7 billion doled out between 1995 and 2005.
Under Dorgan-Grassley amendment, farms like Riceland Foods Inc. and Producers Rice Mill Inc., both in Arkansas – who combined received just under $30 million in 2005 – would only be allowed $250,000 each.
In Chenango County, the average farmer – mostly small, to medium-sized dairy operations – received just $5,211 in federal farm subsidies in 2005, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In the same year, the biggest payment to any one farm locally was $71,000.
South New Berlin Dairy farmer and family farm advocate Ken Dibbell is calling on Congress to revisit reforms like Dorgan-Grassley.
“Under no circumstances should President Bush sign a farm bill without the Dorgan-Grassley payment limitation provisions that were voted down 56 yeas to 43 nays,” said Dibbell. “You are giving lots of public funds to people who do not need it and practically nothing to family farms, who have led this nation quite well from 1900 to the year 2000.”
