[consensusform]

This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty.

Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.

If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.

[CountSessine]

I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.

Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

[jon_richards]

Subsidies have transitioned away from direct payments to subsidized insurance. The insurance isn’t just about natural disasters or crop loss, it guarantees minimum revenue based on farmed area, basically resulting in direct payments whenever prices are low. That has been successfully rebranded as “not a subsidy”.

https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn

[consensusform]

The second link here is a deeply biased political position advocacy opinion piece, so it's a little bit onerous to 'refute' because every section is sort of a misleading half-truth. (I'm not sure what the best example would be, but I'm sure you've read something before where an author was cherry-picking statistics or casting factual elements in dishonest light so that they could support their stance, whether that was about vaccines or immigration or encryption or guns or whatever).

One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.

In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.

Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.

[gwright]

I don't know much about direct corn subsidies, but we could talk about sugar tariffs -- which you could interpret as a subsidy to any substitute product producer -- like maybe corn syrup producers.