But after years of crop failures due to capricious weather and counterproductive farming practices, Brown started to rethink the way he ran his family’s operation, shifting his focus from sustaining degraded soil to regenerating his land. He stopped tilling the ground, phased out all chemical inputs, cycled through diverse cover crops, restructured his livestock’s grazing habits, and implemented other processes that vastly improved the ranch’s soil health and overall ecosystem.

He also started to reconsider his attachment to the government programs that many American farmers depend on, realizing that running a farm to maximize subsidy revenue creates a pernicious cycle of monoculture cropping, harmful synthetic inputs, and time wasted in listless offices instead of experimenting through trial and error on his own land.

“I don’t miss walking into those [government] offices and doing the paperwork and they know every single thing about my operation,” said Brown, who expanded his farm to more than 5,000 acres and has since turned over day-to-day management to his son. “And they say, ‘Oh, but it takes away your safety net.’ My safety net is the resiliency built into my soil. My safety net is the health of the operation. My safety net is the fact that I don’t rely on only one or two commodities to make my income. We have 17 different enterprises on our ranch now. So I’m resilient—our ranch is resilient—because of the diversity and because of the health of the ecosystem. That’s very liberating. It’s a good feeling.”

The Farm Bill has its roots in the century-old New Deal and is revised by Congress every five years. After its current iteration expired on September 30, Congress extended the legislation for one year, meaning that debate over the farm programs that Brown now abstains from will stretch through 2024, as will the dozens of other programs that affect agriculture and food.

“Agriculture is a uniquely coddled industry with the USDA providing more than 150 different programs for the industry, 53,000 farm-related employees in the USDA, and 2,300 USDA agriculture offices across the country,” said Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute.

Food aid for low-income Americans through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which was added to the Farm Bill in 1973 to ensure support from rural and urban lawmakers, accounts for about three-quarters of the omnibus package. Some lawmakers and pundits have proposed splitting SNAP from the Farm Bill to stop the logrolling and facilitate a clearer debate on farm subsidy programs, which make up the rest of the bill.

Those subsidy programs include Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, which dole out payments to farmers based on fluctuations in crop yields and prices, as well as crop insurance, which is the biggest cash cow for the industry.

Tax dollars cover about 60 percent of the insurance premiums that farmers pay, amounting to a record $11.6 billion in 2022, as noted in Figure 1. Total insured acreage has jumped from 206 million acres in 2000 to 493 million in 2022, increasing the taxpayer cost for premium subsidies sixfold in that time frame. The government also compensates the private insurance companies that participate in the program for their administrative costs, which are projected to be about $2 billion per year from 2024 through 2033.

Crop insurance in general can be an important risk management tool for the agricultural industry, but a growing cadre of farmers are pointing to the deleterious effects of subsidizing the insurance, because it can drive up land prices, stifle innovation, harm the environment, squander taxpayer resources, and distort agriculture markets in ways that have serious implications for our food system.

Brown asserts that the vast majority of all planting decisions that American farmers make are based on how much money is guaranteed through subsidized crop insurance, leading to a highly centralized production system.

“Government would like farmers to grow certain commodities, the big players—corn, wheat, soybeans,” Brown said. “By offering those incentives, the farmer’s going to go, ‘Well, I can make the most money planting corn, because I’m guaranteed this amount of money.’ Farmers know as long as they keep their expenses below that payment price, they’re going to make money, so it incentivizes farmers to plant those monocultures year after year.”

Agricultural economist Jeff Schahczenski adds that insurance for specialty crops like fruits and vegetables “are often available only in a few locations, have confusing eligibility requirements, and do not have easily assessable benefits,” trapping farmers into “growing the same few crops or livestock because they are the only options for which good insurance is available.”

This incentive structure, as Figure 2 notes, has led to 80 percent of all premium subsidies flowing to four staple crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton.

“Today’s crop insurance, for farmers like myself raising corn, soybeans, and wheat, is generous and safe—it guarantees a profitable yield and revenue,” said Doug Doughty, a grain and livestock farmer in Livingston County, Missouri. “At the same time, that discourages innovation into more specialty crops that could better diversify and benefit our food supply.”

Row and forage crops account for about 90 percent of all acres covered by subsidized insurance. Specialty crops, such as fruits and vegetables, are responsible for just 10 percent, as Figure 3 notes. This dynamic has larger implications for the US food system and America’s growing obesity crisis.

Emory University and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers examined the diets of 10,308 people in 2016, finding that about 56 percent of all calories consumed belonged to major subsidized foods, such as sodas sweetened by high-fructose corn syrup and meals cooked with vegetable oil derived from soybeans.

“Although eating fewer subsidized foods will not eradicate obesity, our results suggest that individuals whose diets consist of a lower proportion of subsidized foods have a lower probability of being obese,” the researchers concluded.

Corn is consistently the most planted crop in the United States, increasing from around 70–75 million acres in the early 2000s to a projected 94 million acres in 2023. The crop’s dominance is due not only to readily available subsidized insurance but also to federal subsidies for the ethanol industry.

Only about 12 percent of corn is grown for human consumption, while 44 percent goes to animal feed and the other 44 percent to ethanol plants, as Figure 4 shows. Only around 10 percent of US corn production went to ethanol before 2005, when the Renewable Fuel Standard program began requiring oil refiners to blend biofuels into gasoline, artificially increasing the demand for corn production in America’s heartland.

Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, the other main commodity subsidy programs in the Farm Bill, have annual payment limits and are available only to farmers whose adjusted gross income is below a certain level. Crop insurance subsidies, however, are unlimited, so the bulk of taxpayer dollars flow to larger corporate farms and artificially prop up their operations, disadvantaging younger or novice farmers who are still trying to establish themselves.

“It’s the unlimited amount of insurance that can be given no matter how big a farm you are,” said Tim Gibbons of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, a farm and rural membership organization with over 5,600 members. “That entices these farmers—these operations, not farmers necessarily—these operations to get bigger and bigger, because there’s not as much risk to being that big, because insurance programs have no limit.”

Both the federal government and outside experts corroborate Gibbons’s concerns about wealthy farmers’ use of subsidized crop insurance. A February 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that unlimited insurance subsidies “sometimes results in relatively large subsidies for high-income participants.” One individual, the GAO noted, had an adjusted gross income that exceeded limits for other subsidy programs yet still collected $1.2 million in annual premium subsidies between 2009 and 2013. Overall, the top 10 percent of farms by size receive over half of all crop insurance subsidies, while the largest 5 percent receive more than a third, according to an American Enterprise Institute study.

Insurance companies are also more likely to service larger farms because higher premiums allow them to reap more subsidies for their administrative expenses, which cost the government about $2 billion annually. These administrative subsidies are distributed as a fixed percentage of each policy’s premium, but the workload needed to sell a policy does not necessarily correspond to its size, creating a system that incentivizes insurers to focus on larger farms and neglect smaller producers, according to a December 2023 GAO report.

Crop insurance subsidies further disadvantage small or new farmers because the subsidies are partially capitalized into farmland prices, resulting in land values nearly doubling since 2009 and jumping 12.4 percent between 2021 and 2022 to $3,800 per acre.

A 2012 report by the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service noted that “farmland values generally increase with insurance premium subsidies,” though this correlation varies based on geography and the types of crops insured. A 2016 study by Mike Duffy, professor emeritus of economics at Iowa State University, found that crop insurance subsidies represented about 8.5 percent of farmland values in Iowa from 2005 to 2015. As unlimited sums of crop insurance subsidies flow to the largest agribusiness operations and balloon land values, smaller farmers are the most affected, including those trying to lease the roughly 40 percent of farmland that is rented every year.

“The rental market is incredibly hard, and ground is selling at record highs in the Midwest—certainly farm ground,” said Bill Furlong, a farmer who grows corn, soybeans, and hay on about 2,200 acres of rented land in eastern Iowa. “Because of this artificially inflated price, in my opinion, those with lesser means are unable to get into the business or to expand.”

Over half of all young farmers said in a 2022 survey that finding affordable land is “very or extremely challenging,” making it their top hurdle, according to the nonprofit Young Farmers Coalition. It’s no surprise then that the agriculture industry is getting older, with the average age of American farmers jumping from 50.5 in 1982 to 57.5 in 2017. At the same time, the United States has seen a weeding out of smaller family farms due to consolidation. About 57 percent of all cropland acres in 1987 were operated by midsize farms, defined as operations with 100 to 999 acres. Three decades later, just 33 percent of all cropland belonged to midsize operations, while the share of large farms jumped 15 percent to 41 percent in the same time frame.

“This is allowing bigger farms to get bigger at the expense of smaller farms. Caps on crop insurance subsidies would be a way to limit excessive payments to the largest farms,” said Doughty, the Missouri farmer. “Why aren’t we putting a limit on this and making the Farm Bill a little more transformational to reallocate the savings to encourage more specialty crops and local food efforts?”

For some farmers, these market distortions affect more than just the agricultural industry, as consolidation has hollowed out small towns around the country.

“It certainly wreaks havoc on the rural community because instead of having 10 separate entities, you now have three,” Furlong said. “The main thing is it’s depopulated rural America.”

Crop insurance subsidies were originally envisioned as a more stable and cost-efficient alternative to ad hoc disaster payments, but they have acted more as a supplement than a replacement—and may have actually increased risks along the way.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) handed out $31 billion between 2021 and 2022 to about 950,000 farmers as compensation for losses related to the coronavirus pandemic. That’s despite a record $11.6 billion in premium subsidies in 2022 and $8.5 billion in 2021. Before the pandemic, the USDA gave $23 billion to more than 600,000 farmers for losses caused by President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, which saw retaliatory tariffs slapped on key US exports, such as soybeans, dairy products, and sorghum.

Both handouts were marred by potential fraud and government dysfunction. The Farm Service Agency conducted spot checks on 90 farmers who received assistance related to the pandemic and found that over half of them may not have actually qualified for the support, such as one cattle producer who received over $6 million for animals that they may not have even owned. During Trump’s trade war, about $785.6 million, or 5.6 percent, of supplemental assistance payments were improper, according to another spot check review.

The subsidization of crop insurance also discourages farmers from implementing other risk management practices, making farms less dynamic and more susceptible to volatile weather—creating emergencies that might have been avoided in the absence of the subsidies.

North Dakota, for instance, just experienced three of the driest years on record, but Brown was able to adapt to the weather because he wasn’t handcuffed to any government programs.

“I didn’t plan crops like I normally do, like corn, which is a high-water-use crop. Instead, I went to more barley and peas—low-water-use crops. Whereas if I would have been in the farm programs, which my neighbors all did, they just planted corn and it failed and they collected their crop insurance,” Brown said. “Meanwhile, though, I’m growing a crop not having to rely on those government subsidies, and I’m still making money. So it allows much more flexibility, and you can adapt according to conditions.”

Mass enrollment in crop insurance during the late 1990s was spurred by Congress’ decision to increase premium subsidies, but this new set of incentives encouraged farmers to expand their operations onto land that otherwise wouldn’t make sense to farm.

The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service found in 2006 that subsidy-induced cropland expansion disproportionately took place on “low-quality and certain environmentally sensitive lands,” such as highly erodible ground, wetlands that are prone to flooding, and areas with large populations of wildlife classified as imperiled.

For some farmers, this expansion on risky lands leads to an increasingly destructive cycle of perverse incentives.

“With the degradation of the soil also comes a need for more fertilizer,” Doughty said. “A lot of nitrogen and phosphorus leaves our fields during heavy rain events, down the road ditches, to streams, rivers, and lakes.”

Congress tied conservation requirements to insurance subsidies in the 2014 Farm Bill to try to rein in unnecessary cropland expansion, but there is evidence that these two things are still at odds.

A 2019 study in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review found that every 1,000 newly insured acres reduces enrollment by three acres in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which compensates farmers for taking environmentally sensitive lands out of production.

“The rate of soil loss in the corn belt on marginal soils is unsustainable. So, as a taxpayer, would you rather pay for something that is stabilizing future food production or future potential use of the land, or do you want me to farm that highly erodible ground, just keep farming it, and you continue to pay my crop insurance premium with no strings attached?” said Doughty, who enrolls a portion of his land in CRP. “I would maintain that the general public would probably rather see those dollars in some sort of conservation program or practice that reduces soil erosion and nutrient pollution, than just throwing money at crop losses for a few farmers.”

The harms of US farm subsidies extend beyond our borders too. As subsidies decrease prices on the world market, farmers in developing countries, where agriculture makes up a larger share of economic output, are harmed the most.

“A classic example is US cotton subsidies,” explains Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato institute. “The subsidies increased global cotton production and supply, thus lowering the world price of cotton to levels at which farmers in West Africa couldn’t compete.”

Direct payments to US cotton farmers decreased world prices for the crop by about 12 percent in the mid-2000s. The United States phased out those direct payments in the 2014 Farm Bill, but crop insurance subsidies to the same farmers have continued unabated. In 2022, the federal government spent $1.47 billion on premium subsidies to domestic cotton producers—more than twice as much as those same farmers received in direct payments in 2008.With their revenue guaranteed, US farmers still account for about a third of global cotton exports, pushing down prices on the world market.

The United Nations estimates that government aid for farmers worldwide will rise to $1.8 trillion in 2030, with about $475 billion going to subsidies for specific crops and the other $1.3 trillion going toward protectionist measures like tariffs.

These policies’ global harms aren’t just economic or even limited to agriculture. For example, the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round of comprehensive trade negotiations, which began in 2001, broke down after over a decade of refusals by developed countries, including the United States and European Union, to curtail agricultural subsidies.

This refusal to compromise on agriculture subsidies has also ignited trade disputes between the United States and friendly nations, such as Brazil, while holding back negotiations in other key industries.

“The United States’ recalcitrance on farm subsidies helped sandbag a Doha Round deal, which would have given American manufacturers and service providers better access to growing foreign markets like China or India,” said Lincicome, who was previously involved in WTO proceedings as a trade attorney. “The US position stymied not only global agriculture policy reforms but also US negotiators’ ability to pressure other governments to abandon their own sacred cows—on both agricultural and nonagricultural issues.”

The United States is hardly alone in propping up its agricultural industry. Worldwide, 84 countries spent $635 billion annually on agricultural support between 2016 and 2018, according to a World Bank report released in 2023. But this doesn’t mean subsidies are necessary.

Proving that point is New Zealand, which abruptly ended all government aid for its highly subsidized agricultural sector in 1984 as the country flirted with bankruptcy.

“I don’t think they had a vision of eliminating subsidies producing an innovative, dynamic industry. It was a matter of necessity for New Zealand. We were going broke. The subsidies were costing the economy so much. And it wasn’t just agriculture—we had protectionism across the board in so many other industries,” said Lockwood Smith, a lifelong farmer who spent three decades as a member of New Zealand’s parliament before retiring to his beef farming operation in Northland. “The New Zealand economy was absolutely stagnating.”

New Zealand’s agricultural industry was facing similar structural problems in 1984 to those that American farmers are facing now. A 2017 government review found that subsidies had driven up land prices, creating a climate where “few young farmers could afford to buy land”; productivity decreased as “support payments provided a secure income without the need to innovate”; and farmers stopped adjusting to market signals, leading to rampant resource misallocation.

The initial shock did not sit well with New Zealand’s farmers, who derived roughly a third of their income from subsidies in the early 1980s. Smith, who first entered parliament in 1984, noted that farmers staged the largest protest that he can remember during his time in government.

But once it became clear that the government would stand its ground, New Zealand farmers went back to work, and the industry thrived. The primary aim of lessening the burden on taxpayers was achieved, but agricultural productivity also shot up fourfold, and the sector’s share of economic output grew; biodiversity improved as fertilizer use dwindled, decreasing pollution in the country’s rivers and streams; and farmers innovated and allocated resources more efficiently in response to market forces.

“The first change you saw was a drive for efficiency through the whole system,” said Gavin Forrest, a New Zealander who worked on his family’s farm through the 1980s before taking on a policy role for the advocacy organization Federated Farmers. Government subsidies, he explained, perversely thwarted such efficiencies.

Forrest references the “skinny sheep” days as a prime example of these unintended consequences. In the early 1980s, farmers were subsidized based on the size of their flock, not the actual meat they produced.

“There were a whole raft of subsidies,” Forrest explained. “If you increased the number of sheep, you’d get more money.”

As a result, the total number of sheep in New Zealand ballooned to about 70 million in the mid-1980s. After the subsidies were eliminated, by contrast, that number nearly halved over the next two decades, but total lamb meat exports remained steady because producers increased lambing percentages, which refers to the number of lambs born per ewe, and started breeding animals to increase carcass weights.

“The efficiency of our sheep industry doubled,” Forrest said. “The number of animals you have on a property is not necessarily a determination of how efficient and how much you’ve produced. You can have too many animals.” Government subsides considered none of this.

Forrest added that other parts of the agriculture industry, from wine vineyards to row crops, were also heavily subsidized, raising similar problems.

“We fight for freedom to do a whole lot of things in the world,” he said. “And yet we had the state deciding what we’re going to grow, and they might not be telling us what to grow, but they are incentivizing us to do something we wouldn’t otherwise do.”

Back in the United States, on the other hand, crop insurance subsidies discourage farmers from even the most elementary innovation in planting decisions.

“With crop insurance, I can just keep doing the same thing and I’m guaranteed that I’m going to maintain revenue, that I’m going to more than get my expenses back,” Doughty said. “It doesn’t encourage the farmers growing corn and soybeans right now to try something different.”

Agriculture subsidies never returned to New Zealand, with farmers there deriving less than 1 percent of their income from government programs—a much lower level than other developed countries, as Figure 5 shows. Agriculture now accounts for 81 percent of New Zealand’s exports, totaling US$31 billion in 2022.

“We pride ourselves that we farm without handouts,” said Gavin Forrest, a New Zealander who worked on his family’s farm through the 1980s before taking on a policy role for Federated Farmers, an advocacy organization. “We’re not beneficiaries of the Crown. There’s something nice about standing on your own two feet.”

With the Farm Bill under consideration, embracing the New Zealand model is unlikely. Nevertheless, various lawmakers and government agencies have proposed piecemeal changes to crop insurance in the lead-up to its expiration.

The Government Accountability Office suggested in 2023 that adding income and payment limits to premium subsidies would prevent the wealthiest farmers from receiving unlimited payments. Slashing the amount of the premium that the federal government subsidizes would also save money and lessen market distortions. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in 2018 that reducing the government’s share of premiums from 60 percent to 40 percent would save $21 billion from 2020 to 2028, a roughly 25 percent drop in the program’s total costs.

On the other side of the coin, the federal government reimburses 14 private insurance companies with about $1.5 billion every year for administrative expenses related to crop insurance. Aside from the direct payments, insurance companies also enjoy exceptional profits due to the target 14.5 percent rate of return for underwriting gains, which is the difference between the total premiums that the companies collect and the total payments to farmers for qualifying events. Taken together, these 14 companies netted about $33 billion from the Federal Crop Insurance Program over the past decade, according to an Environmental Working Group study.

The CBO projected in 2018 that reducing the reimbursement cap for administrative expenses to $1 billion annually and reducing the targeted rate of return to 12 percent would have saved $4 billion through 2028.

The growing cost of crop insurance subsidies is not a new concern for the federal government. Former President Barack Obama proposed slashing premium subsidy levels and payments to insurance companies multiple times, noting in a 2013 report that the “government’s cost of providing crop insurance has increased dramatically over the past decade.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D‑OR) proposed the most ambitious overhaul of subsidized crop insurance during the current Farm Bill debate by introducing the Assisting Family Farmers through Insurance Reform Measures (AFFIRM) Act in September. The AFFIRM Act would cap annual subsidy payments at $125,000 per farmer, eliminate crop insurance subsidies for farmers who make more than $250,000 annually, implement basic work requirements to ensure that only farmers receive subsidies, and require the government to disclose the names of recipients.

“By establishing modest payment limits and a means test, we can save money while helping small farmers and ranchers who are short-changed or left out altogether,” Blumenauer said in a statement after introducing the bill.

Other lawmakers who recognize the lopsided nature of subsidized crop insurance have proposed piecemeal changes, such as the Crop Insurance for Future Farmers Act and the Insuring Fairness for Family Farmers Act, which would incentivize insurance agents to provide more coverage to small farms and specialty crops.

On the other hand, some lawmakers are pushing for an expansion of government aid. Republican staffers on the Senate Agriculture Committee, for example, wrote in a September 2023 report that Congress should invest in “a meaningful enhancement to the risk management and commodity program tools that farmers and ranchers depend upon to weather a volatile farm economy.”

Aside from crop insurance, there has also been an effort to increase subsidies through the Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs, which pay farmers the difference between an average reference price and market prices for specific commodities. One bill introduced by Rep. Don Davis (D‑NC) would increase reference prices for wheat, corn, soybeans, peanuts, and cotton, meaning that farmers would receive larger payments. On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R‑PA), chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, said he wants to increase reference prices for peanuts, cotton, and rice, which would be paid for by stripping funding from SNAP and conservation programs, according to The Hill. The motivation for expanding subsidies is undoubtedly complex and political. For example, Davis represents more than 3,400 farms in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, many of which produce crops like cotton and soybeans that Davis wants to increase subsidies for. Similarly, Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District is home to over 5,800 farms and would stand to benefit from Thompson’s proposal for increased subsidies. It also surely doesn’t help matters that many of the lawmakers writing these laws benefit from the Farm Bill themselves. A 2023 Environmental Working Group analysis of farm subsidy payments earlier this year found that 25 current House lawmakers had received over $14 million in payments from farm programs since 1995, but that number does not include crop insurance subsidies because those payments are not public information—even though many or all of them likely benefited from the crop insurance program.

In reality, the case for any broad-based federal support for agriculture is weak. Farm households, for example, have a higher household income than the median American, and farming businesses have a lower bankruptcy rate than other US businesses, casting doubt on whether the federal farm safety net that began a century ago—when farmers were much poorer than other Americans—is still necessary.

“Farming is a risky business, but the risk does not seem to be any greater than for many other industries and therefore not a justification for farming’s unique government security blanket,” said Edwards in a 2023 Cato Institute briefing paper. “Businesses in other industries face swings in costs, prices, demands, consumer trends, and technologies, yet they succeed or fail based on their own management skills and without subsidies.”

New Zealand’s experience, as well as that of US farmers like Gabe Brown, appears to bear out Edwards’ contention that American agriculture would thrive without taxpayer support.

“I did take advantage of those government programs for many years,” Brown said. “But once I realized, man, why should my city cousins, as we like to call it, why should they have to pay for my business? Why should they be subsidizing it? If it’s a true business, I should be able to make it on my own.”