By Jimmy Golub
Golub Family Farms
Cazenovia, New York

I am the "Jew boy" referenced in Mark's article about farm subsidies. I am no expert on farm policy but I do want to make a few things clear.

I often hear people refer to family farms as if they are a thing of the past and all farms today are factory farms. The family farm is not dead. Every day for the past 28 years, as part of my job as an Artificial Inseminator, I visit many dairy farms. I assure you, that although there might be some corporate farms elsewhere, at least here in central NY I have never even been to one.

All the farms I visit are family owned. Are these farms bigger than they used to be? Of course. Many of these farmers have purchased more land and actually work what many families used to work. But as equipment has gotten larger, so has a farmer's ability to be more efficient. And these guys have wives and children. I guess they have families, so that makes them family farms. And yes farms do operate as a business, and a way of life.

The point of farm subsidies was to insure that farmers made a decent living so that the American public had a cheap and plentiful supply of food. Now, some of the programs that help subsidize farms are funded by the farmers themselves. A percentage of the milk receipts are taken out to fund some of these programs at no cost to taxpayers. Also, I might add that the food stamp program, that helps feed thousands of needy families, comes out of the farm budget.

Lets understand that the cost of production around the country varies considerably. In the northeast, elaborate housing is necessary to properly take care of cows in our climate. And it is true that in more temperate areas like the southwest, all that is needed is a little shade for housing. But the northeast has a huge market and the costs of transportation of a perishable product make it beneficial to have the production source near the market (now more than ever).

Now after you factor in the fact that most of the dairies in the southwest are dependent on government subsidized irrigation from a water source that is already in deep peril, we certainly don't want to see our dairies here disappear. So if you want to take away our farm subsidies, then to even the playing field we can't have farms located where they depend on government supplied water.

At the same time, our communities realize that having farms in our area is more aesthetically pleasing, keeping development in check, maintaining a resource for future food production that would be otherwise lost forever if it were supplanted by housing, and costing the taxpayer much less in infrastructure than a bunch of homes.

So before we write off the farms in our area we need to consider the consequences. We can not afford to import our food from another country when we have the most fertile land and the hardest working farmers in the world for reasons of national security even if they might be able to produce food below our cost. In some cases we compete against farm products that are more heavily subsidized than our own. We are already being held hostage to oil producers. We do not want to be at the mercy of another country or even large corporations for our food supply.