“There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the air about the state of the farm economy,” says a report by the Environmental Working Group, and much of it is a campaign for larger crop subsidies. “The farm subsidy lobby has been working overtime to use what it calls a ‘farm crisis’ to deflect well-deserved criticism of the fatally flawed federal subsidy program that they’re desperate to protect.”
In its seven-page report, EWG points to a series of hearings by the House Agriculture Committee on the farm economy as in invitation to “Big Ag to declare that the sky is falling.” Instead, says EWG, commodity prices, while lower than during the 2006-13 boom, are still high by historical standards. The income of full-time farmers remains strong, the debt load in the agricultural sector is “remarkably low” and delinquency rates on farm loans are lower than the rates on other types of loans.