South Dakota's oh-so-conservative state and local government officials seem to think the only viable ag is Big Ag. We need California transplant Brita Craven and fellow Rapid City Hens urban chicken advocate Savannah Steen to remind us that small-scale ag conforms nicely to conservative values:

"We want to be able to have hens to provide food for our families. We really want to show the public the great things that can come from backyard chicken-keeping," Steen said.

...Neighbors and passersby often stopped to watch the birds and to admire the attractive, handmade coop. "It built community," Craven said, because people appreciated seeing the virtue of self-sufficiency lived out in their neighborhood.

"It's a myth that most people want to see lawns, not gardens; beige, not color; conformity, not individuality. Living in the city should not mean we forfeit our ability to be self-reliant," she said [Mary Garrigan, "Rapid City Hens flock together to rally support for backyard chickens," Rapid City Journal, 2013.06.10].

We can even make a Chamber of Commerce Republican argument for urban chickens:

Backyard chickens are even good for the local economy, Craven argued. "One aspect of city hens that is often overlooked is job-creation," she said. Local pet shops and feed stores benefit from sales of equipment and supplies; carpenters sell handmade coops (some of which sold for $1,500 or more in California), and many cities sponsor Tour des Coops, promotional events where people view innovative, interesting coop designs [Garrigan, 2013.06.10].

Promoting agriculture doesn't have to involve big handouts and regulatory breaks to massively polluting industrial complexes. It doesn't even require giving handouts to little gals in the marketplace like Craven and Steen. It's as simple as passing sensible regulations (like the chicken ordinance in Sioux Falls) that allow individuals to enjoy a little more personal and economic liberty.

Have some chicken with your tea: Brita and Savannah will be spreading the good word about urban hen ranching today and tomorrow at the West Boulevard Festival at Wilson Park in Rapid City.

School and Public Lands Commissioner Jarrod Johnson recognizes how the federal crop insurance program (which crop insurance salesman's wife Kristi Noem wants to expand) causes farmers to plow up land that's better for other uses than crops.

Now South Dakota State University professor Carol Johnston provides data on just how much of our wetlands we've been sacrificing to cropland:

Comparing wetlands mapped 30 years ago with those areas in 2011, she documented a yearly loss of nearly 13,000 acres of wetlands. Considering only the changes in the last decade, those losses increased to 15,377 acres per year.

The 2012 data came out this spring and, Johnston said, “the rate just keeps going up” ["SDSU Scientist Documents Wetland Losses," South Dakota State University, 2013.05.24].

Johnston estimates that South Dakotanis losing 21 acres of wetlands and 73 acres of grasslands per hour. But why should you care if we're tiling and draining mushy ground and planting corn and beans instead?

“Wetlands are called the kidneys of the landscape,” Johnston said. The soil microbes in wetlands convert nitrate, a form of nitrogen dissolved in the water, into harmless nitrogen gas. Nitrates can pollute well water, making it unfit to drink. Without the filtering effects of wetlands, these nitrates can also encourage the growth of algae. When these algae decompose, they decrease the oxygen available for fish and other aquatic organisms.

Wetlands help recharge groundwater supplies in many places, Johnston explained. Because these shallow reservoirs hold excess water, they can also reduce flooding downstream. Johnston cited an instance in which wetlands along the Charles River in Massachusetts were bought and maintained specifically for the purpose of reducing floods in the city of Boston [SDSU, 2013.05.24].

Folks who want me to build a $6.4-million sewer system to reduce pollution in Lake Herman are going to have a hard time competing with the billions more Kristi Noem wants to pour into crop insurance, which will help pour more nitrates into our lakes and help the algae bloom brighter and greener and stinkier. Folks who like drinking water rather than wading through it might also want to take a look at the farm bill and ask if it is as good for our kidneys—our wetlands—as it is for expanding industrial agriculture.

p.s.: The pending farm bill links crop insurance to conservation measures, but it also reduces the acreage that can be enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program from 30 million acres to 25 million acres.

You can read Johnston's abstract and pay $40 to read her original research in Wetlands here.

The conservative American Enterprise Institute howls that the Senate version of the Farm Bill is full of tricks to hide increased spending and anti-free market subsidies. AEI praises the Senate for eliminating the Direct Payments program ($5 billion of savings!), but they decry the new safety net, the Shallow Loss Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) program:

...this program essentially guarantees that farmers receive approximately 89% of their expected incomes — a program about which no other business in America could dream. In effect, the program would issue payments to farmers when crop prices (and thus revenues) fall [Vincent Smith, "A New Bait and Switch Farm Bill," American Enterprise Institute: AEIdeas, 2013.05.31].

Grocery stores? Car dealers? Anyone else on Main Street care for a federal guarantee that you will receive 89% of your expected income?

This new entitlement program is supposed to cost less than the subsidies the Senate farm bill eliminates... but Smith says that only happens if crop prices remain at their current highs:

Using the assumption that crop prices will remain at or close to recent record highs, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new program would cost $2.372 billion per year. Combine that with the $5 billion Direct Payments cuts, a few other items, and the sequestration savings, and the bill appears to save $2.4 billion annually overall. But if crop prices move back toward their long-run averages, ARC’s costs would balloon to $7 billion or more annually. Under this scenario, the total cost of the Senate Bill would be more than $3 billion more than the previous farm bill, if sequestration is not counted [Smith, 2013.05.31].

I agree with some of my conservative friends that we should end subsidies for big business, be it Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Recruiter, you name it. But the AEI overstates the costs of this new farm entitlement program. According to a University of Illinois brief published by the Corn and Soybean Digest, ARC would base payments on an Olympic average of the last five years of crop prices multiplied by a similar average of local yields. So in the first year of a price drop, farmers would receive the largest ARC payment, and cost for the government could indeed go up. But once that year enters the Olympic average, ARC payments decline. If crop prices settle back to the historical average that AEI fears, ARC payments would use that restored average as their benchmark, and within five years, payments would drop below predicted levels.

Further reducing the cost is ARC's coverage of only a portion of losses. ARC covers only a 10% band of loss, between 89% and 79% of expected revenue. If crop price times yield drops below 79% of the Olympic average, farmers receive no additional subsidy. That's the "shallow loss" part of the plan, beyond which I suppose crop insurance would pick up the tab. Even within that shallow loss band, ARC makes payment based on factors: farmers get 80% payment for planted acres and 45% payment for acres they couldn't plant.

The Senate farm bill still contains handouts for farmers, and there are plenty of conservative and liberal reasons to say we should not prioritize such handouts for one favored industry. But AEI overstates its cost argument against the Shallow Loss Agricultural Risk Coverage program.

Some dairy producers want federal insurance comparable to the subsidized insurance farmers get for crops. Congresswoman Kristi Noem, whose husband sells that crop insurance for a living, wants livestock producers to get a more reliable slurp at the federal teat as well.

White River rancher Eric Iversen explains how federal livestock insurance might ease the market disadvantage current ag policy causes him and fellow ranchers:

"It appears that revenue-based crop insurance is artificially inflating land values and rental rates," said Eric Iversen. "And in order for livestock producers to compete with neighboring crop farmers, maybe it’s time to introduce a revenue-based livestock insurance program. I’ve got a ‘proven yield’ on my pastures and can calculate how many pounds of live cattle have been produced off each acre for the past several years; why can’t I get the same coverage as the crop farmer who keeps production records?" [Carrie Stadheim, "Federally funded crop insurance affects entire ag industry," Tri-State Livestock News, 2013.05.23]

South Dakota School and Public Lands Commissioner Jarrod Johnson sees federal crop insurance driving producers to tear up good grazing land for short-term benefits at the expense of long-term land sustainability:

Johnson, whose agency oversees over 768,000 acres, with roughly two-thirds of their holdings west of the Missouri River, said he is approached more and more by leasees who request permission to break up native sod. He is concerned that producers are jumping in for a “short term gain potential” when nobody knows how long the subsidy will be available.

“We have ag leases and grazing leases,” he said, explaining that only the ag leases can be farmed. While the state agency has the ability to transition a grazing lease into an ag lease, there’s limited capabilities to change it back. The leasee wouldn’t be required to seed it back to grass if he decided that crop farming wasn’t lucrative, and even if Johnson’s office went to the legislature and found the funding to do it themselves, “You can’t just seed it to alfalfa and say ‘it’s ok now;’ you’ll never get the intricacies and synergies provided by native rangelands, back,” he said [Stadheim, 2013.05.23].

But before we go hog-wild creating more corporate-ag handouts, let's hear from former state ag secretary and legislator Larry Gabriel, who's back at the ranch making a living the old-fashioned way, without government handouts. He'll probably catch heck from fellow Republicans for traveling around the world to learn stuff, but he points to New Zealand as a better model for ag policy than Noem's plan for increased government dependence:

“Some say they’ve got to do the same thing for livestock, but I say, two wrongs don’t make a right. I’m a rancher, I don’t buy crop insurance. I don’t believe the retired school teacher should subsidize my operation. When I was the secretary of agriculture, I argued that we [the government] should continue crop insurance for beginning farmers and ranchers, pay the current rate of 62 percent for first 10 years, then 40 percent for next 10 years, then farmers should be able to go on their own after that,” Gabriel still be believes this strategy for insurance would be adequate. “We were in New Zealand a year ago, and the farmers were proud that they have no government programs; they farm for the market. They try to be studious of what the market signals are telling them. They’ve learned that they need to react to what the market is telling them and if they don’t they will go out of business,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel said that when the New Zealand government got into a serious debt problem, not unlike the U.S. financial situation, they cut almost all of their government farm subsidies. “Some of the big farmers had to sell a bunch of their land and young people came in and bought some and they have a thriving, healthy ag economy now,” he said [Stadheim, 2013.05.23].

New Zealand eliminated farm subsidies in 1984. Their experience supports what Gabriel and my liberal farmer friend Charlie Johnson say: take subsidies away from the big players, and you'll see young farmers and small farmers thrive. If Kristi Noem were a real conservative, she'd embrace that free-market/conservationist/liberty policy and advocate for less federal support of agriculture, not more

Robert Heidgerken is a popular Meade County Republican. He won his seat on the Meade County Commission in 2010 with nearly 72% of the vote.

Chairman Heidgerken also agrees with me that we should replace South Dakota's Rube-Goldberg productivity-based agricultural property tax with a straight-up income tax:

A rancher himself, Heidgerken empathizes with the landowners dealing with drastic tax hikes. “Even though it’s a production based system I think their (the state’s) goal is to get it to market value and nobody can afford the taxes on market value. Recreation, development and investment - that’s what’s driving the value of land in Meade county, not production,” he said. Plus, he said, farmers from the Eastern side of the state may look at some of the soil types of Meade County grasslands and assume they can farm it for higher profit margins over cattle production. “But they’ve got crop insurance money backing them and that would be another case of investment driving the market.”

Heidgerken said that the current use of the land isn’t taken into consideration, so farmland and grassland with the same soil type are valued at the same dollar figure.

...“The fairest thing would be to go to an agricultural income tax,” said Heidgerken [Carrie Stadheim, "Meade County Property Owners Appeal Valuations," Tri-State Livestock News, 2013.04.30].

Commissioner Heidgerken is responding to complaints from his fellow Meade County ranchers who have seen their taxes jump since South Dakota switched to the ag-productivity assessment model in 2009. Mud Butte rancher Bill Kluck tells reporter Carrie Stadheim that he has seen his property taxes climb 10% a year for the last three years and now 88% this year. Wasta rancher Morris Linn faces a 75% hike this year, and he can't figure out why:

[Linn] added, “They (the county representatives) keep saying that they are going off soil type and topography but that’s been the same here for the last one hundred years. Nothing’s changed; you can only still raise so many pounds of beef and so many bushels of wheat on the same acreage.”

The cattle rancher and small grains farmer said he doesn’t know how he can improve his bottom line enough to pay the increased taxes. “The worst thing is that if they get our assessment up there and then raise the mill levy again that will compound our problem,” Linn said. “They will probably double our taxes if they raise our mill levy” [Stadheim, 2013.04.30].

These ranchers want taxes based on their ability to pay. They can deal with tax increases if they are keyed to income increases. They would happily trade the current productivity assessment—which is based on arcane math, wishes, and other people's good market luck—for a simple and transparent income tax.

In another strange twist of events, I find myself sympathizing with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The Republican Minority Leader tried but failed yesterday to get the fast-tracked Farm Bill to legalize industrial hemp. McConnell has strong support from back home, most notably from Kentucky's new Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, whose efforts have gotten even House Speaker John Boehner to say he backs letting farmers grow hemp.

And why the heck shouldn't we?

Rep. Kristi Noem showed up to cheer Big Ag in Davison County Friday. The new "Jackrabbit Family Farm" has no rabbits, and it's not a family farm: it's a corporate factory farm that will house 5,000 sows pumping out 125,000 piglets and $200,000 worth of manure each year.

Rep. Noem thinks that's just great:

Congresswoman Kristi Noem, R-S.D., told farm families gathered Friday at a new swine facility south of Mount Vernon that such production units are a shot in the arm for family farming in South Dakota.

Such production facilities, Noem told her audience, will keep families on the state’s farms and will continue providing for the nation’s food supply [Ross Dolan, "5000-Sow Operation Set to Open Soon near Mount Vernon," Mitchell Daily Republic, 2013.05.04].

Help me out, farm economists. How does a factory farm make it easier for smaller independent farms to stay in business? Perhaps piglets are costly to raise, and having one CAFO handle birthing the little squealers makes the whole process more efficient. But if some smaller farm in Davison County is making money raising pigs from birth to bacon, doesn't the economy of scale the Jackrabbit CAFO will introduce force those farmers to either do business with Jackrabbit to stay competitive or go under? How does this concentration of wealth and power in the local market support the independence and viability of small local producers?

Rep. Noem can't answer that; she's too busy saving America with Big Ag:

“For me food has always been a national security issue,” Noem said. “There is a reason we have a farm bill and a reason we have farm policy, and that’s because we decide that it’s important in America that we grow our own food.

“The instant that another country supplies us with our food is the day that they control us” [Dolan, 2013.05.04].

Once again, Rep. Noem invokes national security to make her favored capitalists unassailable. She also speaks from somewhere south of honesty. China, Japan, Mexico, the European Union, and everybody else bought $145 billion in food and agricultural exports from us last year, and I don't think we control any of them.

Plus, we're already well past the instant where another country supplies us with our food. In 2012, the United States imported over 62 million metric tons of food worth a record $105 billion, including $16 billion in seafood, $13 billion in fruit, $11 billion in assorted edibles, and $11 billion in beverages. Noem's assertion that we grow our own food and to avoid international control is economically and geopolitically naïve.

Conceptually it also contradicts her assertion about the good the Jackrabbit CAFO will do for family farms. If getting supplies from another economic entity gives that entity control, then won't the local farms who buy piglets from Jackrabbit be submitting to Jackrabbit's control? Which is it, Kristi?

Dolan concludes his story of Noem's bumbling Big-Ag mouthpiecery with this burst of absurdity:

[Pipestone System CEO Luke] Minion presented Noem with a peace pipe as a memento of her visit. American Indians have traditionally mined pipe materials in the Pipestone area.

Asked if she will take the pipe to Washington, she said, “We’ll see what we can do. We can sure use some peace” [Dolan, 2013.05.04].

Rep. Noem gets a present, and she has to "see what we can do" about bringing it back to her Washington office? What, are peace pipes on the TSA terrorist-weapon list? (No, they're not—just don't try to light the pipe in flight!) Can Rep. Noem not give a straight answer to anything? Or was she just discombobulated by the strangeness of a very white dude co-opting a sacred Indian ceremonial object as a cheap political gift? White industrialists handing out Indian peace pipes makes about as much sense as claiming pig poop doesn't stink.

With her support for more government surveillance, more ag welfare, and more military spending, Rep. Kristi Noem will have as hard a time winning Jim DeMint's seal of approval as M. Michael Rounds.

The far-from-liberal rag Pierre Capital Journal smells Noem's faux-conservatism on disaster assistance for livestock producers. Pierre's editorial board questions whether we can afford to increase disaster assistance when climate change may make disasters a regular experience. And in a provocative statement for scribes surrounded by cattlemen, they ask whether ranchers deserve a special government handout:

The world is full of risk. If Rep. Noem thinks the federal government should step in and protect one industry from disaster, will she be willing to do the same for retailers, or manufacturers, or some other industries? Why does agriculture get special treatment? There are already industries such as insurance and banking that work closely with producers in farm country. We suggest private industry, not the federal government, is the better solution for weathering bad years on the ranch and farm. If the right solution doesn’t exist right now let private industry invent one. Farmers and ranchers got along without these federal programs until 2008 and we believe they can, and should, get along without them still [editorial, "Private Industry Is a Better Option Than Feds for Weathering Disaster," Pierre Capital Journal, 2013.04.28].

Again, that's no liberal rant. That's a straight-up conservative critique of Republicans who claim to be conservative. And that's a call to consistency that entitlement-minded Kristi Noem will not be able to answer coherently.