Farm policy in this country is nothing more than an opportunity for the GOP to pay lip service to something that barely exists anymore, namely, the family farm.  The other aspect of it is how the government spends billions of the taxpayers' money to subsidize bigtime agribusiness to either not plant crops, or plow them over at harvest time, or store commodities in warehouses across the country to rot while some of our children and people living in the streets don't have enough to eat.  This is done to artificially inflate the cost of foodstuffs, so Americans end up paying to continue this nonsense as taxpayers and consumers.  That's really sound policy!!!  Quite frankly, it's wasteful, inhumane, insulting to the taxpayer and consumer and decidely unamerican.  I say, cut all agricultural subsidies immediately and save the taxpayers maybe $40 billion a year.

Farm policy is of incredible importance in the United States because it has to do with many other issues including sprawl and land use, water pollution, and our spiraling health care costs.  Existing subsidies benefit huge food processing companies, and for that reason instead of talking about healthy food like fruits and vegetables, when we talk about food we tend to discuss bewildering "nutrition" issues.

Farm policies are currently completely screwed up. They need to be scrapped and completely rewritten. As they currently exist, subsidies intended to go to smaller individual farmers to help them out are largely going to corporate farms, who would be doing just fine without them. At this point, things would probably be better if all subsidies were eliminated. Then the corporate farms at least wouldn't have such an advantage. I think farm subsidies can be a good thing, but they need to help people who need help, not large corporations who masquerade under names like "xxxxxxxxx Family Farms."

Starving children can't afford milk because of federal price controls. The obesity epidemic can be traced to US subsidies of fattining foodstuffs. And don't even get me started on taxes...

Just not a hot issue for me. I'm wondering what farm policy issue ironlaw is so upset over.

Make it a felony violation of privacy, with a hefty fine ($1,000) payable to the receiver per instance.