Growing sense on arid ground

Rice and cotton require proportionally more water to thrive than other crops, so naturally the federal government since the Depression has paid farmers taxpayer money by the bushelful to manufacture harvests in places where rain is stubbornly disinclined to fall, on land that was formerly desert.

This riles environmentalists, and logic’s sensibilities. Driven particularly by the former, government finally may stem the flow.

But not before having poured more than $687 million in subsidies over two years mostly into rice and cotton farms in California and Arizona, two states gripped by drought, according to The Associated Press.

Subsidy cuts in California loom. Perhaps government now might invest in extracting blood from turnips, or better, water from stones so that the wet stuff can be used to grow rice in some fertile territory, like Death Valley.

Environmentalists’ principal beef is that the payouts — including $79 million in water subsidies for California farmers — drive up water’s use in places where it is in short supply and where the population and, as a result, demand are surging. Farmers counter that the subsidies help provide other things for which supply is needed to meet demand: food and jobs.

Other places where rice and cotton are grown — Texas and Louisiana — also get heaping helpings of tax money but not water at the bargain-basement prices offered on the Left Coast by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates only in the West. Many farmers in California pay about half what cities do for water from systems managed by state or federal government, according to the AP.

Farmers say that without subsidies their operations might die.

“I just don’t think that taking the No. 1 ag state in the country and drying it up is a good long-term answer for our country,” California cotton grower Jim Hansen told the AP.

To which environmentalist Bill Walker responded lucidly: “If farmers’ business model depends on getting taxpayer-subsidized water to grow taxpayer-subsidized crops and they still have a hard time making it, there’s something wrong.”

Here’s something more: Government intervention in agriculture trailing back to President Franklin Roosevelt steadily has ballooned unabated by reality’s pin-prick.

The aim of Roosevelt’s initial meddling was to increase farmers’ income by driving up prices. How to do this? Pay farmers subsidies to keep land idle, producing diminished supply, which then triggered higher prices.

That approach evolved over time to the point that powerful Fortune 500 companies along with assorted other “farmers” — like David Letterman and ex-NBA star Scottie Pippen — were collecting government money. Changes in last year’s farm bill began chiseling some of that fat.

Something similar might be happening in California. The water subsidy cuts there have resulted in some farmers switching to crops that need less water. Go figure. Without government money, the allure of seeking to coax cotton from parched earth dries to dust.

Unfortunately, for many farmers, government carefully has cultivated an untenable formula, placing upon them the burden of massive regulation while leaving them dependent on milk from government’s breast.

Slashing water payouts in California is one step among many more needed to bring down the lurching subsidy monster government created and then gorged.