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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

It's true that farmers of commodities like corn and wheat have the government wrapped around their fingers. But the reason they're big enough to do that is that their market scales. No one has invented a fresh carrot that can sit on a shelf for six months the way a candy bar can.

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I heard a radio show (I think it was NPR) about this recently. "Speciality Crops" don't get much in the way of government subsidy.

What's a "specialty crop"? The general rule appears to bet that if it is a recognizable vegetable that would appear in it's natural form on your dinner table, it's a specialty crop. Interestingly, many of the nation's (and world's) specialty crops are either locally grown, or are shipped in from California.

If it gets processed into something no longer recognizable as food, it's not a specialty crop, and is most likely getting subsidized.

Ironically, the government recommended food pyramid is the inverse of government subsidies.

Only 1/3 of US ag is subsidized, but its a disgrace. The programs damage the environment, cheat consumers, and pay the wealthy. Off the top of my head, the major program crops are corn, wheat, soy beans, cotton (!), milk, peanuts, and sugar.

More here: http://www.freetrade.org/node/609

"in 2005, farms with average household incomes of $200,000 per year accounted for 9 percent of all farms but received 54 percent of government payments."

The subsidies follow the disproportionate voting power and political influence of the relevant mid-west states, not the inherent marketability of corn.

Veggies and nuts are mostly grown at massive industrial operations in California with desert sunshine and irrigation systems. It's definitely a scalable operation not much different from corn and soy.

Not to nit-pick, but carrots keep really well even at room temperature. That was the whole point of root cellars. Veggies store fine. Lots of "fresh" stuff at the store routinely comes out of 9 months in cold storage, and that's without the complex chemical processing and packaging applied to the junk food. Then there's freezing and pickling.

The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan to pump out more cheap calories. It might have made some sense in a Marshall plan world, but we're still stuck with it. That's the story as I understand it.

>The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan to pump out more cheap calories.

It was deliberately done by the government? I probably shouldn't be surprised... I always assumed it was the corn farmers pushing for subsidies that did it. Do you have any more information on this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Career

> Butz revolutionized federal agricultural policy and reengineered many New Deal era farm support programs. His mantra to farmers was "get big or get out," and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow to fencerow."

movie recommendation (and accidental pun on parent poster): King Corn (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115). Enlightening.

Another related movie (was on Sundance this past weekend): http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/film.htm

I didn't like that one very much, it seemed rather one-sided.

For example, I thought it was bullshit to claim that Brazilian farmers are starving because other countries are buying all the soy beans. Clearly it is a political problem, otherwise Brazil would use the money it gets for the soy beans to buy other food for the farmers.

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