With the debate over the proposed Farm Bill heating up, The Heritage Foundation’s Daren Bakst and Diane Katz ask and answer 10 questions about the wayward bill.

1. What Is the Farm Bill?

The “farm bill” is a deceiving name name for this recurring piece of legislation. It is really just a food stamp bill mixed with numerous agriculture subsidies. Bakst and Katz note that “the vast majority of spending—about 80 percent in the 2008 bill—is dedicated to food stamps and other nutrition programs.” This isn’t really a farm bill —  it’s a welfare bill.

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Congress is currently debating the so-called “farm bill,” which Heritage Foundation experts Daren Bakst and Diane Katz call “a multi-billion-dollar tangle of agriculture subsidies, welfare payments, and environmental patronage.”

In fact, this legislation is really a food-stamp bill with farm programs tacked on. As Bakst and Rachel Sheffield explain, this approach allows urban and rural lawmakers to join forces to spend taxpayer money. Continue Reading »

The farm bill is responsible for the dramatic increase and expansion of many subsidy programs. Worse, the debate over its renewal is often confused by unrelated programs tacked onto the legislation, Heritage Action for America CEO Mike Needham and Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal.

Heritage Action is a sister organization of The Heritage Foundation.

The bill funds policies such as farm subsidies, crop insurance, and commodity quotas. But 80 percent of what has been marketed as a farm bill actually goes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

Needham and Stutzman urge lawmakers to consider these different programs separately: Continue Reading »

How wasteful are farm subsidies? Heritage Foundation investigative reporter Lachlan Markay has the scoop:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has doled out millions of dollars in subsidies to farms on which farming isn’t actually taking place, according a new report from government watchdogs. Billions more have gone towards supporting farms that don’t grow the crops for which they’re being subsidized.

USDA gave nearly $3 million last year to 2,327 farms that had not grown any crops since 2006, according to the report, released last week by the Government Accountability Office. Of those farms, 622 had not grown any crops since 2001.

Read more about this absurdity on the Foundry.

Many provisions of the current farm bill will expire at the end of September. It is estimated to have cost Americans $284 billion over the last five years.

Most programs in the farm bill were established during the Depression-era and they have not changed as our agricultural landscape has changed. Through various farm subsidies, the burden of agricultural risk is placed on taxpayers. Heritage Foundation policy expert Diane Katz says “Americans are taking a double hit:  Tax revenues are used to subsidize producers, and production limits raise the cost of products.”

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