Quote:
Originally Posted by The2Dogs
So what is next? Do you believe that the government should take over the sale and distribution of food and stop that horrible profiting by farmers, distributors, grocery stores, restaurants? How long before they control what you can buy in the name of good health? How about they control what you eat.
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Do you not understand how they have been in the farming business for 50+ years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_farm_bill
The farm bill was first created during the
Great Depression to give financial assistance to farmers who were struggling due to an excess crop supply creating low prices, and also to control and ensure an adequate food supply.
[4] The first farm bill, known as the
Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA), was passed by Congress in 1933 as a part of
Franklin D. Roosevelt's
New Deal.
[5] The bill allowed farmers to receive payment for not growing food on a percentage of their land as allocated by the
United States Secretary of Agriculture. It also enabled the government to buy excess grain from farmers, which could then be sold later if bad weather or other circumstances negatively affected output. The AAA also included a nutrition program, the precursor to food stamps.
[6]
In 1938, Congress created a more permanent farm bill (the
Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938) with a built-in requirement to update it every five years.
[5] In 1996, the first major structural change was made to the farm bill when Congress decided farm incomes should be managed by the free market and stopped subsidizing farmland and purchasing extra grain. Instead, the government began requiring farmers to enroll in a crop insurance program in order to receive farm payments. This led to years of the highest farm subsidies in American history.
[6]
Direct payments also began in the late 1990s as a way to support struggling farmers, regardless of crop output.
[5] These payments allowed grain farmers to receive a government check every year based on yields and acreage of the farm as recorded the previous decade.
[6]
