Years ago I heard a banker say that if he had to choose between managing an agricultural loan portfolio made up of 20 mid-sized farms covering 10,000 acres or 5 large farms managing the same area, he would choose the former.  He admitted that only dealing with the five could greatly simplify his workload and consolidate many of his complex lines of oversight. But, if one of the twenty mid-sized farms experienced a hardship other linked businesses and institutions like grain elevators, seed and input dealers, even schools and churches could weather the storm. On the other hand, if just one out of five large farms experienced a failure, the shock could threaten the whole system.

Oxfam has long argued that US cotton subsidies damage lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers in developing countries at a high cost to American taxpayers(see also this study). Unfortunately, subsidies for US cotton producers included in the Senate Farm Bill proposal continues this trend rather than reverses it.

US commodity farmers deal with acronyms on a daily basis simply because their income is as much tied to government policies and programs as it is to weather, soil, seeds, and rainfall. Over the past thirty years, I’ve had to master the ins and outs of LDPs, CRP, CSP, CU acres, DPs; I’ve had to adjust my memory as ASCS became FSA and SCS turned into NRCS.

The telephone rang at 6:30 a.m. It was my wife. Her first sentence: "We had 24-hundredths of an inch of rain last night." I relished every word as if they were drops slowly soaking into parched earth.