So, what is the answer? Let people starve? Farmers do one thing. They feed and clothe the world. Take enough farmland out of production to put back all the little patches, layout fields and hedgerows and you take millions of acres out of production. Not all those acres are marginal land, either. Most marginal land isn't growing crops, now. A large portion of it is in pine trees. Why?, to make paper for the worlds population. Take all pesticides away and immediately, in one year, there would be world shortages of food, feed stuffs and cotton. So, what is the answer?
Don't answer with your mouths full, now.
SRH
Stan, we took 30+ million acres out of production when the CRP got started. I think the eventual total was right around 35 million acres. And the farmers--at least those in the Midwest--were the beneficiaries. (As were the pheasant hunters, like me.) People tend to forget that although the CRP was presented as a conservation program--and it did take quite a bit of land out of production that probably never should have been growing row crops--an initial goal was to reduce an oversupply of certain commodities (like corn), thereby increasing the price. While paying the farmers to plant grass (or trees) on those acres. Worked like a charm. Part of the problem resulted from that old GA governor, Carter, deciding that the best ways to really get tough with the Russians over their invasion of Afghanistan was to keep our Olympic team home from the Moscow Games, and to embargo grain to the Soviet Union. Whatever else the Russkies were, they were also--at that time--a good cash customer for grain. Take them out of play, commodity prices decline, farmers go broke. Sometimes taking land out of production--as long as the farmer can afford to (he gets a govt check)--isn't a bad idea. Especially considering yield per acre for many crops has increased a whole bunch. We can grow more on less land.
But then corn prices increase; the guys who have land in the CRP see those prices. And, when they're able to do so, they pull out of the CRP and start growing corn. In the case of the Dakotas, in a lot of places where corn had never been grown before. (Mainly because they don't get enough rain year in and year out.) And they make good money in a good year. Or did, until supply once more caught up with demand, prices dropped . . . and now I wonder how many of them wish they'd stayed in the CRP. But with Washington cutting CRP acres, that option isn't anywhere near as widely available as it once was.
So what was a very good short term solution on the part of the government turned out to be not such a good long term solution. Then there's the fact that it costs taxpayers a lot of money when the govt pays farmers to take millions of acres out of row crop production.
