Meanwhile, across the pond...  

Our distant cousins are about (perhaps) to reform EU farm subsidies.

The changes would award 30% of subsidies to farms that maintain permanent pasture, biodiversity in crops, and uncultivated spaces. It also proposes decreasing subsidies on a sliding scale for farms receiving more than €150,000 in annual subsidies, with a cap on subsidies at €300,000. These measures will remove funding for Europe's largest farms, which currently receive the majority of subsidies, and encourage them to alter intensive farming practices.
Geneviève Savigny a lobbyist for small farmers, says that this penalization will not produce its intended consequences because it is not aggressive enough.
"The cap is still very, very high," she said. "It will make a difference for large farmers, but it won't have a very big effect on smaller farms."
Smaller farms may be helped, however, by the overhaul's proposal for member states to increase distribution of payments based on production. These types of payments were largely outlawed in 2003 in an effort to bring Europe's farm subsidy program in line with international rules set by the World Trade Organization. Negotiators must still agree on how big these payments will allowed to be.
The proposed overhaul would impose fundamental changes on Europe's system of market regulations, which are supposed to buffer farmers from wild swings in global commodity prices but have run afoul of WTO rules. Negotiators must set a date to end to Europe's sugar production and export quotas, blamed for pushing up domestic prices. [More]

This is ominous, or least unsettling, for our sugar industry. They have frequently pointed to EU subsidies as an excuse for our wretched protectionsism.

The  €300,000 payment cap has been strongly opposed by large farms, so progress in this direction is a major step forward.

The European Commission wanted to cap single farm payment subsidies at 300,000 euros (£257,000; $397,000) a year, but governments led by the UK and Germany are reported to have crushed that proposal.
Big farmers are often the most efficient, they said, and should not be penalised for that.
The UK and Germany have many big farms, efficient at producing food intensively, and the big landowners are a powerful lobby in both countries. In contrast, France has many small, traditional farms, often less efficient.
It is the latest blow to the Commission’s plans, as its master scheme to radically reform the Common Agricultural Policy approaches an endgame, with key negotiations in Luxembourg next week.
It is already clear that the Commission’s original proposals for “greening” the CAP - forcing farmers to earn 30% of their subsidies by protecting the environment - have been heavily watered down after resistance from big farmers. [More]

I can't help but notice the difference in reportage between the BBC and WSJ, with the latter seeming more optimistic agreement can be reached. Whether something has happened in the last few days or just bad interpretation is hard to tell.

An honest count...  

I have always been perplexed by our profession's obsession with over-counting our numbers. Take the ubiquitous "2%".  That's 6,200,000 people!

That's also ridiculous.

In 2010, there were 1,202,500 farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers and an estimated 757,900 agricultural workers were employed in the US. Animal breeders accounted for 11,500 of those workers with the rest categorized as miscellaneous agricultural workers. [More]

That's a pretty reliable number, I think. But there are some issues with it as well.

• The farmer number is based on the old USDA "$1000 gross" rule. In fact, 60% of the 1.2M "farmers" are retirement and lifestyle farmers who like the many advantages of Schedule F, I would suggest. So at best - even counting very small farms - the number of what most people would call farmers is around 500,000 AT MOST.
• The balance of the 2% seems to be "others living on farms". The best number I can find is 4.6M which in some Alternate Arithmetic Universe gets rounded up from 1.48% to the Magic 2%.
• Even the above number is questionable because:

In 1993 the Census Bureau stopped counting the number of Americans who live on farms. "Farm residence," it reported, "is no longer a reliable indication of whether or not someone is involved in farming. ... The cost of collecting and publishing statistics on farm residents and farmers in separate reports could no longer be justified." [More]

• So if your wife is a teacher, nurse, plumber, truck driver, or nuclear physicist, we somehow still get to count her among our ranks.
• Your kids count too.

In short, Jack Nicholson was right - we can't handle the truth. And we go to remarkable extremes to distort the data.

One of the most egregious truth-masseurs is Farm Bureau. I remember from my days as a county president (admittedly in the Paleolithic era) the hushed mumbles that accompanied membership numbers. Because FB is a well-funded, expertly-staffed auxiliary unit of an insurance conglomerate (which any Wall Street analyst would conclude from looking at their books), they have concocted unique euphemisms to describe their members as farmer-like entities.

Farm Bureau’s national membership rose to 6,279,813 member families in 2010, marking 50 consecutive years of membership growth. State Farm Bureaus overall reported a total 2,149 more member families this year than in 2009. [More]

Member families? A more accurate label would be "insurance customers who are required to become members of the FB". The fact that TN is the largest membership state should be a clue these numbers say little about actual farmers. Somehow this distinction is skirted when FB testifies before Congress, allowing the organization name to imply a vast base of voluntary dues-paying members.

But aside from the embarrassing lameness of such efforts to inflate our numbers is the question, "Why bother?" Why can't we be OK with an accurate count of our group's ranks?

We're not the only minority struggling with this anxiety.

We’re slowly getting a sense of how many TGBQLX people there are in America. I.e. how many homosexuals, lesbians and transgenders there are in the population. When I was a newbie gay, the mantra was 10 percent. We were “one in ten”. Seriously.
This immediately struck me at the time as a) obviously propaganda and b) ridiculously insecure. There was no way to know for sure, given the ubiquity of the closet back in the 1980s, but ten percent is a hell of a lot of people: 30 million. Why did I keep bumping into faces I recognized wherever I was in the US? If it were really ten percent, where were they all?
And why on earth does it matter if we make up 10 percent or 1 percent? A minority’s civil rights are not dependent on how many of them there are or how large a segment of society they form. Do we say: sorry, guys, you only form 2 percent, you don’t meet the minimal bar for becoming a minority? It’s not like running for the Knesset. It struck me then and now as part of a wearying tendency among some gays to think that every straight dude is just a few beers away from being gay (that’s not how it works); or a desperation to feel somehow more significant because of larger numbers.
Which simply make it all the more of a relief to see that Gallup has finally come up with a believable number of around 3.5 percent. (Check how gay your state is here.) DC is the super-gayest “state” – but that is a little distorted since DC is really the inner city of a larger metropolitan area and the gays tend to congregate there. But there’s also the attraction of politics for gay men. If you’ve ever spent much time among the staffers on the Hill, you’ll know what I mean: the US capitol makes the Vatican look straight. [More]

Sullivan is right: why does it matter? We don't get subsidies because of block voting - we were heavily against Obama and he is our best hope to continue the handouts, especially the ethanol mandate. Clearly government money messes with your mind.

I've always thought minimizing our numbers would have a bigger PR wow-factor. "Only 50,000 farmers produce 87% of the ag products [totally made up example]" seems more impressive to me. If farm payments are slipping away, why not change our thinking to at the very least make sure we actually know how many we are?

Farmer numbers need to come out of the closet.

Problem solved...

Just bill Uncle Sam. In a rather typical fashion Big Seed (I think I just made that up, BTW) has found a way 'round those pesky Brazilians who won't pay tech fees.

On February 18, Republicans in the House of Representatives defeated an obscure amendment to the House Appropriations bill by a 2-to-1 margin. The Kind Amendment would have eliminated $147 million dollars that the federal government pays every year directly to Brazilian cotton farmers. In an era of nationwide belt tightening, with funding for things like education and the U.S. Farm Bill on the chopping block, defending payments to Brazilian farmers may seem curious.
In order to understand this peculiar political move, one has to look all the way back to 2002, when Brazil filed a case in the WTO challenging U.S. cotton subsidies. In 2004, the Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO found in favor of Brazil, ruling that government subsidies afforded U.S. cotton producers an unfair advantage and suppressed the world market price, which damaged Brazil's interests. After multiple appeals the WTO upheld the original ruling, and by 2009 the U.S. still had not reformed its cotton programs. Brazil then asked the WTO for permission to retaliate against the U.S. by imposing trade sanctions. The WTO decided that Brazil was entitled to impose 100-percent tariffs on over 100 different goods of U.S. origin. Even more importantly, however, Brazil was entitled to suspend intellectual property rights for U.S. companies, including patent protections on genetically engineered seeds.
In WTO language, Brazil was allowed to suspend its obligations to U.S. companies under the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. This constituted a major threat to the profits of U.S. agribusiness giants Monsanto and Pioneer, since Brazil is the second largest grower of biotech crops in the world. Fifty percent of Brazil’s corn harvest is engineered to produce the pesticide Bt, and Monsanto’s YieldGard VT Pro is a popular product among Brazilian corn farmers. By targeting the profits of major U.S. corporations, the Brazilian government put the U.S. in a tough spot: either let the subsidies stand and allow Brazilian farmers to plant Monsanto and Pioneer seeds without paying royalties, or substantially reform the cotton program. In essence, Brazil was pitting the interests of Big Agribusiness against those of Big Cotton, and the U.S. government was caught in the middle.
The two governments, however, managed to come up with a creative solution. In a 2009 WTO “framework agreement,” the U.S. created the Commodity Conservation Corporation (CCC), and Brazil created the Brazilian Cotton Institute (BCI). Rather than eliminating or substantially reforming cotton subsidies, the CCC pays the BCI $147 million dollars a year in “technical assistance,” which happens to be the same amount the WTO authorized for trade retaliation specifically for cotton payments. In essence, then, the U.S. government pays a subsidy to Brazilian cotton farmers every year to protect the U.S. cotton program—and the profits of companies like Monsanto and Pioneer.  [More]

This is why I get peeved with the NCGA occasionally. Why can't they get the CCC to pay my tech fees?

Now let's talk about how farmers hate on the deficit some more...