Supporter Of Small Family Farm example essay topic

Oxfam America is a supporter of small family farm based business, according to Laura Rush the US government spends up to 16 billion dollars a year on farm payments. Most of those funds from the US government go towards large commercial farms. Oxfam America is supporting the act called the Rural America Preservation Act, which will help smaller based farms with funding. Since there are so many loopholes in the current government system that are only helping the larger commercial based farms, this Act will help prevent these loopholes and help the smaller farms with more funding.

There are many misleading ideas about the small scale farms, some of which are that small scale farms cannot support a family, that they need to grow into large scale farms to make money, and that small scale farming is usually just a hobby or for extra income. After researching the agribusiness, most of these accusations and most because small scale farms could be more successful if they were provided the support from state and federal governments like they should be. In the statement of Barbara Fiori to (2005), the US government spends up to 16 billion dollars each year on farm payments, and 70 percent of the money goes to the farms that are already receiving government funding either through different federal grants or state funding. The article discuses how the large commercial farms also hurt smaller farms abroad. Since a large farm can mass produce a product they can sell their product at a much lower price because of the supply they have, verses the smaller farm that can not produce as much so it must then have higher prices. Even though this example that Oxfam give us is using farms from abroad it is the same kind of situations small American agribusinesses are facing.

Andrea Perera of Oxfam said that the Rural America Preservation Act if passed will limit the subsidy payments to industrial farms and corporations and will help family farmers make a living. If passed, this Act will now have a cap on payments the farms will receive; the payments will be lowered by 30 percent from $360,000 to $250,000 said Perera in her article and most loopholes in the current government allow the largest farms to collect enormous subsidies, which can exceed $1 million will also be taken care of too. In doing research it seems that most "common" people or people that grew up in larger cities have been mislead to what a small farm is. Some people do not believe that there are families that base all of their income on their family farm that is run by just themselves.

Some believe that families that farm on a smaller scale usually do it for the extra income or as a hobby, but according to the Census bureau, they are not considered hobbies if they spend more than half of their working hours on it. The Census Bureau reports that these primary small family business farms have less than $100,000 in annual gross sales and that practically half are less than $50,000 a year in annual gross sales. A big part of their income goes right back into the preparation for the upcoming planting season, so if they were helped out more like the larger scale farms most of the money for the preparation could be taken care of. There are so many things that farmers must face in order to have a good harvest each and every year. First, the small farms cannot afford the irrigation systems that the much larger scaled farms can. This means that the family farms must rely on enough precipitation for the harvest to grow, dissimilar to the larger farms that can regulate using their irrigation systems.

When these larger farms receive all these payments from the government they, can afford the essentials that are needed to farm. There are also other products that the large farms can purchase are getting their fields tiled, which are drains put right into the ground for fear that they receive too much precipitation, if they receive to much precipitation then the crops will just drown and die. Likewise, if they do not receive enough water then they can burn up and die. These are all benefits that the large scale farm can pay for since they receive more funds. There are so many prerequisites for farming; fertilizers for the soil, fertilizers for bugs and weeds, they need tractors which are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, they need wildlife control so that deer and other animals will not eat up all their crops and they need water.

All these things must all fall into place each and every year for the family farms to succeed. The larger commercial farms receive much more subsidy payments, and in accordance with Environmental Working over the past decade, taxpayers wrote 1.6 million agriculture subsidy checks worth more than $1.3 billion and approximately 70 percent of those payments went to large urban areas in the United Sates (1999). From my own knowledge that I know of, there are not too many small family farms in large urban areas of the states. Also in another situation of the large commercial farms the USDA estimates that corporate concentration in the beef-packing business alone costs the nation's cattle producers $10 billion a year in revenues (Gorelick, IS EC). With only a small fraction of the price of food going to farmers, a season of hard work can easily leave them with just enough to pay for inputs, farm labor, machinery, rent, and interest on their loans. The smaller family farms that don't earn enough to pay those costs could lose their farms.

We need to reduce the handouts to the corporate farms that lead to overproduction, with the surplus dumped on the markets from these commercial farms at prices below production costs will drive crop prices down, threatening the livelihood of family farmers across the world. This act will help better delegate where most of our tax money will go and funds from the government. The Rural America Preservation Act will help our American family farms receive these payments from the government that the large commercial farms have been receiving in the past. This Act is very important to the smaller family farm businesses; it will help them grow and become more successful in the agribusiness. This will prevent the payments going mostly to the commercial sized farms and help support the smaller farms.