The other day I was talking to my daughter Marti. When I was staying with her we would have coffee together every morning. It was just the two of us and we could talk about anything and usually did. She has a great sense of humor and we would laugh about many of the things we talked about. Things that we found funny or interesting. One day we were talking about farmers. More specifically the fact that the government has a program that compensates farmers for not planting anything. We started talking about the ramifications of that program and how the first farmer to be told that this was a thing would have reacted.
So the government person meets with the farmer and says…OK we have a new program and here is the way it works. You know that 40 acres you have at the northeast part of your farm. We would like you to not plant anything there this year and we will pay you to not plant. I don’t know if you have seen the movie Trading Places but these two very wealthy guys decide that they would have Dan Akroyd who was their financial guy change places with Eddie Murphy who is this guy that is down on his luck. When they take Eddie Murphy to this amazing apartment they tell him that all of the stuff is now his. He doesn’t trust them and keeps saying…”This is my stuff?…All of this is my stuff? Even at that he puts things in his pocket because he doesn’t really believe that all this great stuff is now his. In a similar way the farmer must have thought that the government representative had lost his mind. He had to question the whole idea of not planting and getting paid to do it. So you are saying that I don’t plant that 40 acres and you will send me a check each month for not planting…right?
Lets take this whole scenario to the farmer explaining this to his family. His wife has to question this entire program. Let me see if I understand you….You do nothing with that 40 acres and the government will pay you to do nothing. Farmer replies…yes, that’s what he said. Wife in disbelief…Are they going to put that in writing? Farmer…I will find out. Of course, they have to put that in writing…how else would they convince the farmer to not plant.
Even today I find this program suspect. At the end of the day there are plenty of starving people in the world and we are paying farmers not to plant. I am not a farmer and I certainly do not understand the reasons behind this program…I am sure that there are plenty of good reasons to do this. Maybe it helps keep the prices up for the farmers that are planting. No matter…honestly, I don’t know of another industry where you get paid to do nothing. It would have been interesting if the paper company I worked for had decided to stop their machines and reduce the amount of paper that was available thereby reducing the amount being made and cause the cost of what was left to sell to be higher. I guess we would need a government program for that to really work. Also, it seems pretty arbitrary and I don’t think it would work unless all paper-making companies all reduced the amount that they made. This sounds illegal so I will stop there. I guess the agricultural thing is not seen in the same way as possibly manipulating the price of say wheat, or sorghum(again what is that?), or corn. They obviously work under different rules than other producers of products. I think I am getting into something that might be controversial so this little article will end now. I don’t think it is necessarily wrong for a farmer to sit down in his Laz-E-Boy, relax, enjoy the time off and wait to see if this will continue beyond this season. Maybe the government spreads the “no plant” program around so that many farmers can enjoy not planting. I am in way over my head on this one.
