Boy, I wish all strings could be this good. There are a lot of problems with the farm community and they are not really being addressed because the right questions are not being asked. Some of the problems have been put on this string.
From an economist's point of view, my biggest problem is with market manipulation and how that takes value out producer's pockets. A cheap food policy (so everyone can get enough food to eat) only distorts the amount of income to producers. We need to look at the policies coming out of our government and see if these policies are in the best interest of ECONOMY, not in the best interest of campaign contributors (Tyson, Cargill, Con Agra, Monsanto, ADM). Producers are as much a part of the economy as they are. Their interests need to be taken into account. Just giving them a handout is not the solution. Making sure that their interests in the economic game is. As rkaiser points out, they have a multitude of people in our capitals trying to influence policy to their ends. Producers have only the good will of polcy makers to do the right thing up in Congress and in the regulatory agencies. They have been infiltrated by the interests of the packers (large corporate campaign contributors) masquerading as consumer interest. It is a lie.
Our rural communities are suffering from these policies. Look at any rural America or Canada and you can see this. The bottlenecks of our value are in the hands of people who want us to compete but do not want to compete themselves or they want to find ways to compete unfairly to drive honest competitors out.
The cattle cycle of producing more supply is a long term cycle. It is ripe for manipulation because of this. While packers want to argue that demand is weekly, they know it really is not. They have the inventory and the captive supplies to make sure it is not weekly. Cryovac and other technologies have allowed them more bargaining power over the manipulation of that supply and inventory. They argue that they must be allowed to be "efficient" by securing enough supplies to run the packing plants continuously through captive supplies and other means. This only takes away the only bargaining tool that producers have--limiting the supply to the plants and making the plants pay more for the cattle.
The little mechanism of formula pricing and the cash market was a really good scheme for taking advantage of the market supply and demand characteristics so they could swing the cattle markets to their advantage. It is complicated enough so people can not easily argue against it without a real in-depth discussion and full of so many diversions and illusions that seem to make sense. Then on to the hill where the decisions get made. Producers are totally outnumbered there with corporate lobbyests and have little chance other than a few congressmen and senators who know the industry well enough to know what is going on and are willing to stand up and not be bought off. After Donna R. resigned, we got the inactive, incompetent, can't win a case and is promoted anyway, JoAnn Waterfield as acting director of GIPSA. A Washington insider!!! Their only advancement in D.C. is through pleasing committee chairs who have been bought off by industry and jump to help their campaign contributors interests. Now we have an NCBA member that probably doesn't know the issues well enought and does not know the limits to his power really makes him a puppet anyway.
I will shortly be posting an example of this corruption of the producers by the "studies" (if they are still available on line) that come out of the land grant universities. Stay tuned, Jake.