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Hard Times in the Delta as Farmers Consider Letting Crops Rot
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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My main exposure to crop farming has been through the series Clarkson's Farm, so I'm no expert ...
... but from what I understand it costs a hell of a lot of money to rent the equipment needed to harvest the crop, and then you still need to store and process it. If there is no guarantee you can sell the end product, sinking loads of money into the harvest is less appealing than just cutting your losses and letting the crop rot.
It seems like the kind of market inefficiency capitalism so often touts itself as the answer to. Why not make an agreement with a brewery to take the rice, and share any profits from sake? Just as an example, I don't know if that exact scenario could work with this sort of rice. Pairing up excess produce with businesses who don't mind getting free materials shouldn't be that hard.
thats why its extremely subsidized.
Then it is a waste of money as well, no?
Part of the reason you subsidize is that overproduction most years is a feature. You dont want a "not enough food" situation in the lean years, and growing enough to make sure of that guarantees that the farmers go broke.
That said, the specifics of how and what the US subsidies go to are pretty bad: we mostly pay for the creation of cattle feed and motor vehicle fuel.
I get that. It's a shame that food isn't treated as a pubic good that simply needs to be provided for free at the point of consumption. I know some people would maybe overeat, but it's not like making them pay has solved that problem.
We subsidize for corn syrup and sugar to a large degree too, products americans get way too much of, because they are artificially cheap, it's a cheap filler in processed foods.
Which would be a good function of the government, to make sure produce finds a market, and doesn't get wasted. As long as we subsidize, and we should to protect our abilities to grow food if not for sugar and corn, we should be doing it to lower costs for citizens and to make sure nothing gets wasted.
Like in 2020 during the pandemic, crops were rotting in the fields. They were throwing around trillions of dollars to subsidize corporate profits, but we couldn't be bothered to make sure crops didn't get wasted.
As extra benefit, plowing them back into the soil means the nutrients get recycled, so less fertilizer needed next year.