Things have gotten bad, really bad, when you start reading “Iowa Farmer Today” (or “IFT” as those of us in the know call it.) If you care about food, however, that’s a place where you a likely to wind up. Ok, maybe not if what you care about about food are the top notes of the boeuf bourguignon at the local chez whatever. If, however, what you care about is what we are going to try to do to distribute the agricultural wealth of the nation to the people who need food (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) then the discussion in the Iowa Farmer Today may be more important to you than you think.
See, the thing is that there is an ongoing discussion happening about how we produce and distribute food in this country. It’s a discussion we have every four or five years when we start talking about the “Farm Bill.” This is the bill that funds most of the various programs of the US Department of Agriculture, and which technically expired at the end of September. The programs it funds, however, are everything from crop subsidies to food stamps and each of those programs is chuffing along one way or another for the time being. Some of them may end around the time of the Mayan Apocalypse and others will survive in perpetuity, like cockroaches. The point of having one farm bill is to bind up all of these programs into a unified approach to food and farming.
Simple as pie. As simple as balancing the rest of the budget, which we are about to do too, right? That Fiscal Cliff may be as real as the Mayan Apocalypse, maybe even more so. In any event, the Farm Bill seems to be getting caught up in the vortex of a bright blue 1966 Thunderbird heading out into the desert. There are worse things. It’s possible that rather than making great cinema, Congress might actually make some decisions. One of these could involve the extent to which we will look to the government or the private insurance market to stabilize the production of food in this country. If IFT has it right, this might give us a great deal of insight into how a lot of similar decisions will be made. Thinking with our stomachs again, apparently.