Not farming very profitable for some

Wednesday, July 26, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

Having grown up in the midst of cornfields as far as one could see, I was struck the other day on a trip home by the emptiness now of so many of those acres that once produced prize-winning crops. While fields stood fallow, the barns and homes seemed as prosperous as ever.

When I inquired about the farm economy of my ancestral counties - my mother's pioneer family stretched across three or four of them - I was informed that sometimes these days, it is more profitable not to plant. That was confirmed recently by news reports detailing the enormous cost of farm subsidies handed out frequently to many who have no connection whatsoever to agriculture. The reported subsidy figures amounted to billions and billions of taxpayer dollars.

In Oklahoma, my wife's bachelor uncle lived on the farm that had been homesteaded by his parents before the turn of the last century. Being the baby of the family, Uncle Leroy came back after World War II to the farm. He and one of his sisters helped their mother after lightning killed my wife's grandfather. Their seven siblings went off to other endeavors. For at least the last 20 years of his life, Leroy lived comfortably alone without planting an acre or selling a cow or pig.

He sustained a decent personal lifestyle by leasing some of the acreage to nearby farmers and accepting his government check for not planting. We never asked how much that amounted to. We assumed that it probably wasn't much since Leroy didn't travel much or buy big new cars. His wants or needs were relatively simple, it seemed. So when he died a few years ago in his early 80s, the last of his own brood to go, his surviving nieces and nephews expected there wouldn't be much left.

But Leroy had built a sizable nest egg from government subsidies for not farming and the land itself went for a nice tidy sum. The "cousins," as they called themselves, were pleasantly surprised.

He once confided that he had no understanding of how the subsidy thing worked or why and that it seemed somehow counterproductive. But he explained that he took what they gave him and didn't ask questions, particularly as arthritis and other maladies developed over a young life spent in harsh labor took their toll.

America's farmers were as much the muscle of the national strength as those who toiled in the steel mills or auto factories. They managed to keep a starving nation alive during the Depression despite drought and foreclosures. Indeed, they fed the entire world when it was necessary.

The 160-acre family farms of my boyhood no longer exist. They are now large corporations with thousands of acres and hundreds of thousands of dollars in machinery, livestock and buildings.

Yet the Congress insists on programs that were designed for the agriculture of yesterday, tapping an already strained, deficit-ridden budget for annual subsidies that often go to people who wouldn't know corn from beans - people who have bought land for a home only to find out that they can claim a federal payment for the rest, which was once planted in rice or some other crop.

Even the Agriculture Department, once a political force in this town, is now an anachronism with more employees than there are farmers. How can we continue to afford it?