Here’s Ken Cook from the Environmental Working Group, giving a talk called Turning the Farm Bill into the Food Bill. The bill is coming up again in 2012 so it’s time to start talking and doing something about it now.

Interesting. I didn’t know:

• The food bill is $412 billion from 2008 to 2012.
• There are an enormous number of absentee farmers getting subsidies. Some of them are not even living.
• 60% of farms do not get any subsidies.
• The top 10% of farmers take 74% of the money (Wow, sounds like regular life with the top 1% of Americans having ¼ of the wealth)
• 22 of the 435 congressional districts get half of all the farm subsidy money. Yes, the people on the sides are paying for the people in the middle. But that’s not news and it’s not limited to farming.
• We the taxpayers pay for both the insurance premiums and the claims for disasters! (We did a similar thing in the bank bail out—are we stupid or what?)

Here are some things I want in (or out from, as the case may be) a food bill:

• Remove the rich absentee farmers and the dead ones from the subsidy roles.
• Stop subsidizing ethanol.
• Stop subsidizing monoculture farms and tax them for the damage they’re doing to environment.
• Reward farms that are sustainable and leaving the land better than they found it.
• Invest more into organic and permaculture farming

There’s more information at the Environmental Working Group site, like:

23 of members of the 112^th Congress (or their family members) signed up for taxpayer-funded farm subsidy payments between 1995 and 2009.

EWG maintains a subsidy database. Texas is #1 and Iowa is #2 in getting subsidy money. Connecticut is #45 and none of the farms on the list are farms I recognize from the markets.