Friday, May 13, 2016

The Irony of Farmer Welfare

I read this bullshit blog post today from this dairy farmer (Dairy Carrie) complaining about how little they’re paid for milk and how rough life is milking all those cows on the farm.  Well, it set me off…  First off, the US gives roughly $20 billion of our tax dollars to farmers in the form of handouts each year.  And secondly, in general the folks who vote republican and support farm subsidies are the same ones who spend a lot of time ragging on other social safety nets, not to mention that evil ‘socialism’ word in general.  This woman does seem to generally want to do something positive with her blog and facebook accounts, but it’s hard to hear about your ‘hardships’ when you’re flying to conventions every other week and spending all your time on social media.  Hard to imagine where you find the time for all that ‘tough’ farm work…



Here’s what’s really happening…

Corporate Farms = Mom & Dad had a huge piece of property.  Parents die in 1965.  Leave equal parcels to each kid.  Kids decide to lump the land together and form a family owned corporation.  So essentially in South Dakota and other middle states, you have all the land owned by just a few families.  Family business = corporate farm.  The Republicans just renamed that shit so that it sounded better than a few white folks getting super rich and still receiving government handouts in the form of Farm subsidies.  And those families don’t necessarily sell to companies like Cargill.  In many cases if they want to go do something else, they can just rent out the land to companies like Cargill or other farmers for a profit.  The land value alone of each of these family or ‘corporate farm is worth millions.  You’d have to be an utter moron to sell.

My absolute favorite part is that in her post, she makes sure she never discloses actual profits or specifics in any of her replies to comments, even though her real goal is just to ‘educate’ us all about the hardships of her profession.  The statement she’s really making is; Feel bad for me, I’m only making a few thousand dollars in profit this month instead of the usual ten thousand dollars.


Even better, the 30 and 40 year old kids of these owners are living on the farm (mom and dad’s basement) working the land and complaining about how they as farmers make less than a $15 minimum wage.  But it’s a lie.  They’re living room and board free.  Being paid a stipend of $1500 a month and stand to inherit a multimillion dollar fortune when their baby boomer parents finally croak and they inherit the business.  News flash, that’s NOT minimum wage you redneck assholes.  But yeah, having to pay a decent wage to the Hispanics and HS kids working your land would put a dent in that profit from those government checks, wouldn’t it?

And in case you don’t want to take my word for it. 
Dig deeper and educate yourself a little more…

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