subsidy scheme as detrimental to their competitive balance, fwiw.

I don't disagree with you on the main, and clearly keeping relative inefficient farmers in business is a thing. But so long as North Dakota and Iowa and Kansas get as many senators as New York and Pennsylvania and Texas, we'll see strong compromise on spending between the urban food stamp representatives and Big Ag Subsidies to ensure money flows to the fields.

As an aside, as you likely know, I own farmland in North Dakota, which I lease to my brother-in-law, on a crop share basis. Since my lease involves a lot of risk (no crop, no income) I get to participate in some of the farm programs. I can tell you that in 2020, I got 4 checks from Uncle Sam for "covid relief," as far as I was ever able to tell. One of them was for compensation for low prices, a check which I had gotten for a few years. The other three just came.

There's a saying popular among the wiskerando farmers in North Dakota who gather at the Cenex for morning coffee and gossip, that the key is to learn to "farm the government." When I lived up there, I was also dirt farming 4-7 acres for a local farmer's market. We worked our asses off without a dime of subsidies. The farmers working this market were plenty envious of the wheat farmers with their six figure subsidies that help drive land prices up to the point that only big farmers could afford.

Don't even get me started about numerous schemes to rip off the very heavily crop insurance subsidized programs.