Farm aid diminishes Arkansas Delta farmers' adaptation to weather change

Alan Bjerga in the Commercial Appeal (Memphis) via Bloomberg: ...Drought helped drive the cost of crop insurance to a record $17.2 billion last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. But there is little effort by authorities to persuade farmers to dial back on crops in an era when weather extremes are more apparent.

“We have given farmers incentives to take on more risk rather than give them an incentive to create a permanent solution,” said Vincent Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University in Bozeman. “You want to move toward programs that allow them to alleviate problems before the fact.”

USDA subsidies encouraging farmers to ignore addressing extreme weather are harder to justify, Smith and other analysts insist, when automatic budget cuts remove 5 percent from most U.S. programs and lawmakers prepare to craft a new five-year farm law.

Disaster declarations by the USDA have become commonplace over the past decade, as farmers face the disruption of traditional growing seasons. Each of the Arkansas Delta’s 26 counties has received a primary disaster designation in at least eight of the past 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Every one of the state’s 75 counties has been declared a primary disaster area by U.S. officials in at least six of the past 10 years, meaning that at least 30 percent of a single crop has failed....

This is a locator map showing the Arkansas Delta in Arkansas. The Arkansas Delta is not a well-defined region, so this map shows universally-accepted delta counties in solid red, and counties sometimes reffered to as delta counties or partial delta counties in lighter red. Brandonrush created this image, using the original from David Benbennick. For more information, see Commons:United States county locator maps.