"The over-production of oil, fat and sugar, largely due to government subsidies to protect farm industry revenues, has contributed over decades to the health crisis we have today."

Hay is not an oil, fat, or sugar crop, at least not to my knowledge. Your type of farm isn't one of the ones under discussion. Corn farmers, sugar beet farmers, yes. But not cattle and hay.

I'm not agreeing with the article above in terms of farm subsidies supporting obesity out of hand. I don't know enough about the subject to just nod and say yes. But I do know that the way our food is produced and processed is making us sick.

Our soils now lack the vital nutrients they once had because of chemical fertilizers and all the "-cides" dumped on them for decades, so our food has fewer nutrients. This is not controversial, dozens of different publications have been saying this for years.

The way our food is irradiated, pasturized, homogenized, processed, or otherwise de-natured in order to last longer during transport or to give a longer life on a shelf in a box removes what nutritional content the food might have once possessed. And don't think that fortifying or enriching the products after they've been denatured (ruined) by processing mitigates this, you've removed fourty or fifty beneficial, naturally occuring nutrients and are replacing them with five to ten artificially produced ones. And, I must add here, many of the Vitamin Bs and Vitamin D that are used to "enrich" come from potato, something that DD is intolerant of, so basically, if it's not on the outside edges of a grocery store, we can't eat it, they put potato is just about everything. If you're intolerant to corn, you're in the same boat.

Our farmers should get paid the true value of their crop, consumers should pay the true value of the meat, dairy, and produce that they consume, and the whole system should not have to be propped up with subsidies.

I was living in the middle of dairy farm central during the small family farm crisis of the 80's and remember the first Farm Aid concert, may God bless Willie Nelson. Family farms cannot compete fairly with the huge agribusiness enterprises. Family farms are on incredibly fragile footing. I'm not saying stop subsidies, I'm saying, why should huge agribusinesses/conglomerates get subsidies?

"When farm subsidies began during the New Deal, they were intended to help the impoverished small farmer. But because they were pegged to total marketings and total acreage rather than to personal income, they wound up lining the pockets of the wealthy. If farm subsidies are continued -- as they should be in order to stabilize farm income -- they ought to be strongly weighted in favor of smallness." from The Case for Redistribution

Anhata
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