Why don’t we stop worrying about the big farm bill?
The Farm Bill was supposed to help the U.S. farm economy recover from the Great Recession, but a growing body of research has begun to question the long-term sustainability of this new program.
While the program’s detractors argue that it’s been plagued by problems ranging from a lack of oversight to the use of taxpayer dollars to support industries that benefit from cheap labor, the vast majority of the American farm workforce and the country as a whole are actually better off than they were a year ago.
And as the Farm Bill’s economic impacts are still being studied, it’s not clear how much it can realistically help.
But there’s one way in which the farm bill could help: By providing a way for farmers to sell their produce.
This is already happening.
Since the farm-bill debate began in 2011, more than 1,200 farms have agreed to sell all of their produce to other farms in exchange for the promise that they’ll be given a discount, according to a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The goal is to provide a way to get around federal regulations and quotas that restrict farmers from selling their crops to consumers.
But a growing number of farmers are wary of this program.
They argue that many of the farmers who signed up to sell will end up paying higher prices than if they were not participating.
And while there are some who are willing to sell, the number of farm-sale programs has been growing steadily.
As of October, more farm-share programs were in place than the total number of farms that were in the program in 2019.
And more than 3 million people were signed up for a farm-to-school program in 2017, according the Farm Bureau.
And a growing share of those who participate in these programs have their produce sold to consumers, too.
According to a survey conducted by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, nearly 40 percent of Americans who said they were participating in a farm sales program said that they’d purchased their produce directly from the farm, rather than buying it through a farmer.
The number of Americans participating in farm-ship programs, where a farmer is able to ship their produce over the country to be sold to a consumer, has grown dramatically.
There are currently more than 20,000 farm-ships operating in the U