I'm From the Government, and I'm Here to Help You ...

I'm From the Government, and I'm Here to Help You…
by Karen Beth Pike, Columnist

"Taking Care"

October 17, 2003

These are perhaps the most frightening words I've ever seen in print. In the past couple of weeks I've had some mail from the folks at the Farmland Preservation Program. On the surface the propaganda machine makes it sound like a pretty good program. A nice break on your property taxes by keeping your land in agricultural use. Upon review of the paperwork from the program I feel it should have a skull and crossbones and a hazardous materials sticker on the envelope…

Okay, maybe I'm overreacting a bit. But here are the facts:

Eligibility:
* County must have an agricultural preservation plan certified by the Land and Water Conservation Board.
* Landowner must be a Wisconsin resident.
* Landowner must own 35+ contiguous acres.
* Farming must produce gross farm profits of $6,000+ in the past year or $18,000 over the past three years.
* Farming operations must be in compliance with conservation standards.

Agreement:
* 10 to 25 years.
* No structures can be built except for agricultural use.
* Nice little parenthetical note: The Department of Agriculture becomes the first lien holder on any mortgage.
* All farming must be in compliance with soil and water conservation standards adopted by the county.
* Breaking the agreement means paying back all the credits plus interest.
* Any sale of the property commits the new owners to the agreement from the past owners.

Then there is the schedule on the maximum credit allowed on the property taxes. Interesting to note that the less money you make the larger the credit will be. So far, it makes sense, right? Well, maybe in the liberal "feel-good" sort of way that pushes it through the media channels as a good thing.

Here is the reality of the program. The formula for the credit uses all of the income produced in the family, not just the farm income, so the common situation of one or more people in the family working a city job to help keep the farm going doesn't help at all. Added to that, the government holds the first position lien on the farm. So once again, the government has made a deal that punishes the achievers and puts the property in their own pockets if the farmer fails and then kicks them off the farm they worked so hard to get or keep.

Evidently P. T. Barnum was right. According to the summary sheet with the application there are 1.11 million acres and 7,317 individual farmland preservation agreements on this program. The average credit per claimant was $797. To carry out the comparison using figures close to the average, a credit of $742 would come from an income of $7,500 on property taxes of $1,000. Could you live on $7,500 per year? Of course you would have to come up with the $1,000 to pay the taxes first. Not likely, so let's try another example. A credit of $720 would come from an income of $25,000 and property taxes of $3,000. A little closer to reality, but again, have to pay that $3,000 first, so we're already down to $22,000 and that's less than $2,000 per month to try and live on. Considering most people have a mortgage on their farms, and probably some equipment and other costs of running the farm, this becomes ridiculous. By the way, the calculation uses gross farm income rather than net farm income for the calculation, while it uses adjusted gross income for the off-farm income. I also find it amusing that the maximum income shown on the form is $40,000. Whose side are these people on?

Perhaps this is an example of the kind of government that we have created for ourselves. People cry that we aren't doing enough for whatever group, and then new laws are created to make these people feel better that they've "done something" about some real or imagined problem. By the time the political machine gets finished with the idea, it becomes a far different kind of creature than was initially imagined by the starry-eyed folks that started the ball rolling at Farm Aid or whatever well-intentioned group planted the idea in the infertile, poisonous soil of the liberal media and the politicians. Most of those people have never set foot on a farm and wouldn't know what the farmers needed most because they've never bothered to ask them. The media splash is what they are really after… so the old Clintonesque notion of "I talked about it, so now it is fixed" is still alive and well. ***

Photo of Karen Beth Pike courtesy of the author