The status quo here in the East for many ears now has been "farming the programs."
When I see guys running several quater-million-dollar cotton pickers running in the fields in theall, who cannot scrape up enough spare resources to no-till a bushel to the acre of bin-un grain for cover crop when they are done picking, I honestly don't get it. Their topsoil erodes all winter, and I guess a lot of them visit it when they take their vacations at the beach the next summer.
We've tried to exist as much as poissible without relying on program payments. Right now, I estimate that they about offset the federally-mandated local expenditures in our property tax bill...in other words, a wash to pay for all of the entitlements that others receive, that we are forced to pay each fall jus tto keep what we've worked a lifetime to buy.
You folks live where there is still a lot of rural and ag-related infrastructure and he culture is still built a lot around farming. Carolina is a lot better conserving countyr assets in that respect than was VA, but I'd say it is slipping with each passing year.
For example, every little slaughter plant that closes is one more nail in the animal ag coffin...then, once there are not enough in private enterprise left to support a viable ag sector, government steps in to site "regional facilities." Just got the card about a meeting to start towards one in the neighboring county today. I don't have time to go, but I'd say even if they get the money, no one will want to host the plant, thanks to NIMBY.
We just have it all backwards here...regulate families out of business, then look for some fat grant to build one at public expense. Around us, I expect to see fewer families settling in, our school sysem is at half-capacity or less than it was 15 years ago, although we've closed four or five schools, we've built one new and they want one more, and a new courthouse.
God help us...we cannot afford the light bill on the last white elephant they built with USDA Rural Development money, and probably 6 million has been spent running water lines to fewer than 10,000 people.
As chairman of our county planning board, I see both too much and not enough. The safety net is all that's kept us afloat. If it's pulled out from under us, we will be left with even more extreme ends of the very rich and the very poor, and fatally fewer middle class residents in between.
Disparity and maldistribution of money - locally, regionally, and nationally - is the end result of the trend that's blowing in the wind right now.
