Only dead farmers don’t complain, goes an old German saying. It’s true that the farmer’s traditional lot offers plenty to grouse about. You can’t take a vacation, or even sleep in on Sunday, when there are cows that need milking. Torrential rain can destroy a crop, just as drought can leave it to shrivel. Frosts, locusts, rapacious tractor dealers, flighty heirs drawn to city lights—the farmer’s woes are endless. And so, apparently, is the compensation farmers have milked out of the government for putting up with all that (see News: Briefing). Taxpayers pony up for a bewildering array of subsidies for U.S. farmers—defined loosely to include urban-dwelling landowners who wouldn’t know a spavin from a ham hock—that come to more than $14 billion a year. Grain and orange farmers collect for weather damage; sugarcane growers get their inflated prices government-guaranteed. Buy land where rice once grew and you can collect payments just for not growing it.
The farm lobby’s uncanny knack for turning any change in the status quo into a new subsidy came hauntingly to mind as I read about the London taste-test of the first lab-grown hamburger meat (see News:Talking points). You might reject cultivating tissue in a petri dish as an outrage against nature and good taste, or you might greet it as a chance to feed the world without having to graze and slaughter livestock. But some farm lobbyist may already be reckoning what it could mean for the 90 million head of cattle in the U.S. If Frankenburgers ever do take off, will we have to pay real cattlemen just for the memory of their once-thundering herds?
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