Part and parcel of the US disfunction is the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal. It is based on erasing land theft and slavery while making farmers a special category worthy of praise and special treatment. It is perpetuated in our ag policies today and so are historical injustices.

Why is farmland generally taxed at lower rates than non-farmland? Why are farm inputs exempt from sales taxes in my ag state? Why do we pay farmers to do anything for the social good while expecting nothing from them? And why do white farmers operate 94% of farmland and own 98%?

If anybody has the chutzpah to come after me for these statements with the counter of how hard settlers worked before you do please have the grace of thinking of the fate of the people they killed or displaced in that process and how farming depended on slave labor in the south.

All the chatter about rewarding farmers for good stewardship & paying them for minimal efforts to sequester carbon has to be contextualized within this history & Biden’s promise for racial & env’l justice. If you cannot see it, you are part of the problem not of the solution.