Elton The web site your talking about is "EWG farm subsidy database". The numbers there can be misleading if you just look at them without knowing what they are made up of. They list the payment numbers from 1995-2017.
I have not taken any direct subsidy payments in that time. If you look up our farm it shows numbers that total in the millions in "Commodity Subsidies". So how is this possible??? Grain loans. It is common for us to store the grain and sell it after the harvest glut. Until around 2010 we would take loans out from the "Commodity Credit Corporation" until we retailed the grain. We paid interest on these loans and paid back every single dollar of the loan amount. The loan amount with interest, shows up in this data base as a subsidy.
Truthfully I think the EWG people know this and do it deliberately to inflate the numbers for grain farmers. The EWG backers are against subsidies to farmers. So it makes their case look better to make farmers look as bad as possible. The majority of the people that look at the site have zero idea of what is in the number they are posting. This includes many smaller farmers that think every big farm/farmer is getting an unfair payment.
The actual fact is the larger farms get a much smaller per acre payment than the smaller farmers do. The USDA payment limit guide lines effect larger farms but rarely smaller farms.
The subsidies help the smaller farmers more than a larger farmer when looked at as a percentage of total income.
The larger operations have a BIG lead in economics of scale. Modern farming is a very capital intense industry. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans can be gotten for a cheaper interest rate than tens of thousands. Hundreds of tons of inputs can be bought cheaper than tens of tons. Selling grain in larger amounts can gain added prices too. Then the biggest is the cost per acre of equipment. The large operations very well have millions of dollars of equipment. They spread that out over thousands of acres of crops. So for many of the better ran large operations the equipment cost per acre is much less than the majority of smaller farms.
Want to know what farms usually have the highest equipment cost per acre??? Mid sized dairy farms. They have grain equipment plus the hay and forage equipment. That is one reason that they are having the most trouble right now with the current dairy prices.
So if the government would eliminate all grain farm subsidies it would make the farms get larger quicker than it is currently. So do not hate on the good BTO too much. If they are hurting if your a smaller farmer your going to be hurting worse.
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