Wednesday, January 12, 2011

If you want to know...

What a joke farm subsidies have become check out this announcement from Facebook about buying the domain name fb.com from Farm Bureau for a cool $8.5M.
Today Reuters is reporting that the Fb.com  domain acquisition, which moved the 6 Million member Farm Bureau over to Fb.org, cost Facebook $8.5 million.
“At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer.”
We of course are still chuckling over how Zuckerberg announced the sale “The farm bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell Farm subsidies.”
Hmm … Not even virtual ones? [More]
Yeah - we've become even more of a national joke as farm income increases on farms receiving unneeded payments.  I pretty sure tweeting about it won't stop the snickering, either.

1 comment:

O in MN said...

The current farm bill really does nothing for the operator. A farm with a larger payment will just be bid higher for rent or sale, so the only ones that really benefit are the landowners and half of those are absentee owners. The current farm bill fails because it really only benefits two crops in my area. While the previous farm bill encouraged diversity (remember "freedom to farm") the current farm bill went against that by allowing payments to be based on updated base acres. Taxpayers need to ask themselves how they want their money spent, on a specialized agriculture where only two crops are grown or on agriculture where there is diversity, so it can be decided which crops are truly the best to be produced.