Rio GrandeValley farmers know all about dealing with adversity, having faced both times extended droughts and severe flooding — sometimes in the same year. They also know about maximizing their land, sometimes managing to take advantage of South Texas’ tropical climate to squeeze out two harvests of some crops.
Now the federal government is asking farmers nationwide to see if they can add another crop to their fields in order to address the several shortages and rising prices of produce at our grocery stores.
Many farmers might be able to do that. In recent decades they have done wonders, outpacing the needs of growing populations through selective planting, raised beds, improved irrigation and fertilization and, yes, even genetic adjustments. Those measures have helped increase plant output, disease and pest resistance, extended shelf lives and reduced spoilage.
One way government officials can help further improve agricultural output, however, is to just get out of the way and let our farmers do what they know best.
There’s no shortage of government meddling in our farm industry. Federal measures often reduce food supplies. Sometimes we pay twice, through higher prices as well as the taxes that fund agricultural subsidy programs.
Some of those programs and their effects are well known. Our government pays some farmers to leave their land fallow too boost prices for others. Some growers receive subsidies when high supplies from other countries cut prices.
Reports abound of dairy farmers contracted through federal purchase programs to fund school lunch, low-income commodities and programs who dump millions of gallons of milk down the drain because the produced more than was needed, but were paid for everything they could produce.
Consider this: Our federal ethanol policy targets Midwest corn farmers merely because of patronage through their congressional representatives. So many corn farmers sell into the program that it reduces the supply of wheat for flour and other products, thus raising our cost of bread and other wheat-based goods. Beets can produce twice the ethanol per acre and sugarcane can produce ethanol seven times more efficiently, and yet many sugar growers in the Valley and elsewhere receive government payments because a glut from Cuba and other countries depresses the market value of sugar. In an unfettered market South Texas sugarcane growers could reap more rewards by feeding the ethanol industry. Corn farmers could bring more corn-based products to our store shelves and tax-funded subsidies to both industries could be erased.
It’s also no secret that recent strict immigration policies have contributed to food shortages. Vegetable farmers in South Texas and beyond have left many crops to wither in the fields because the immigrant labor on which they depend has been unable to enter this country.
Government officials obviously see that food shortages are hurting our country. If they open their eyes further, they might see that they cause many of those shortages, and that the best remedy is to remove programs that exacerbate the problem, and let the market do what it does best.
