Art Cullen.

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Farm subsidies, that is.

They distort markets, suppress diversity, and create winners and losers. We can’t get by without them.

Nearly 70% of farmers surveyed in the 2025 Iowa State University Farm and Rural Life Poll agree that increased specialization in commodities like corn, soybeans and hogs has led to a loss of farms. Just 16% think that’s good for farmers — they’re the guys bidding $32,000 per acre for the precious right to own a piece of Sioux County while the rest smell their fumes and lose a little on every extra bushel.

Most farmers (69%) feel they have no control over profit or loss, 67% think that relying solely on corn and soybeans contributes to financial risk, and 60% feel chained to inputs that seemingly never go down when commodity prices do (in the opinion of 88%).

Iowa farmers do not like where they have been forced.

They see it destroying their towns and driving out people. They, too, find the trend unhealthy.

Sixty-five percent say that federal support is vital to their operations and are nervous about the farm bill. It is three years overdue because House Republicans can’t agree on how best to gut food stamps.

It shows you what the modern Republican Party actually thinks of farmers.

We put up with it because we are trained. You do what you are told. Previous rural life polls tell us that farmers would like to do more conservation agriculture if only the landlord would let them.

You’re just going to have polluted water if you dare live here.

If you are going to raise chickens you do it in a factory and not a roost.

You will grow what the government allows for. You plant corn and soybeans even if the market doesn’t want them. You hope for a bailout when the government destroys soybean exports. This time it’s slow coming.

We could demand that Rep. Randy Feenstra earn his pay and deliver a farm bill that corporate interests obviously do not need. They like cheap corn. He’s on the agri-industrial hamster wheel with the rest of us. He is such a reliable water boy that they want to make him governor.

All of us have witnessed the Great Iowa Deterioration where the school bus routes run so long that you can barely get there from here. Farmers tell ISU they can see the connections.

“It’s pretty clear that Iowa farmers feel that the shift over time from diversified systems to specialized production of a few commodities has been hard on farmers and rural communities, collectively speaking,” said poll director J. Arbuckle. “We’ve asked most of these questions multiple times since 2009, and there has been surprisingly little change in responses over time.”

Our sclerotic political system is clogged with money aimed at controlling food production. With half as many farmers and schools over the past 50 years, they are getting the job done at $32,000 per acre.

Most of us are coming to a recognition that we were better off when the farmer in Providence Township owned the chickens and the hogs. What we fail to appreciate is that the industrial ag policy enforced by the government is what drove out the independent owner. Farmers who say they want to earn their living from the marketplace acknowledge they cannot survive outside the government support system.

We could change the system. We could put a value on diverse food production, when four companies control meat, another four control seed, and another four control fertilizer. We could bust it up. Our brains have been enrolled in a set-aside program.

We could vote for something different. We go along to get along. Who are we to stand in the way? No farm bill, we will manage. Just keep the crop insurance subsidy intact. Pray the bird flu is not a bother, because where would we be without the chicken manure?

That is an Iowa frame of mind. Also lurking in the rural recesses is a recognition that this is not working out like it should. Farmers understand, as keenly as anybody.

Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot newspaper, where this column first appeared. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please consider subscribing to the collaborative at iowawriters.substack.com and the authors’ blogs to support their work.