| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
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these groups suggest tweaks to support mechanisms or target prices, but generally they prefer to keep the system largely as is.9
Livestock-based commodity groups (e.g., National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Pork Producers Council), agribusiness corporations (e.g., Cargill, Tyson), and trade associations (e.g., American Meat Institute, National Grain and Feed Association), which represent nonsubsidized farm sectors or industry, argue that commodity supports should be gradually diminished so as to reduce government interference with trade and market forces. They are often, however, not as aggressive in these positions as commodity crop groups are in defending their subsidies, choosing instead to remain on the sidelines of commodity policy. This might be in part because livestock and industry groups do benefit to some extent, even if indirectly, from cheaper, subsidized commodities or in part because they see themselves as further removed from direct questions of subsidy policies.
In general, these production-oriented groups value economic productivity in agriculture above environmental and social concerns, although they certainly acknowledge that agriculture should protect the environment and rural communities. In the 2008 farm bill debates, they differed from one another in the extent to which they supported some iteration of status quo farm policy or instead favored commodity policy reform to allow market forces to operate more freely.
Environmental Groups
Environmental groups argue that agricultural productivity gains have come at the expense of the environment and that the farm bill should do more to promote conservation. Economic and policy incentives for increasing productivity, they argue, have tended to favor monoculture and biculture systems over more diverse cropping patterns. Whereas in the 1940s a typical Iowa farm produced hay, oats, corn, soybeans, and pasture, with rotated idle lands, the typical Iowa farm today produces corn and soybeans with little fallow (Green Lands Blue Waters, 2004). With the advent of corn ethanol for fuel, Midwestern agriculture has moved toward an even heavier emphasis on corn (Hoskins, 2007).