Robertson County, like other counties in Tennessee, is experiencing a decline in the production of tobacco, a crop that once fueled the economies of farming communities across the state. The state wants to more than double agricultural enhancement grants, to $11 million this year, in part to help farmers get out of tobacco and into more profitable agricultural ventures. According to a recently released USDA report, 750 fewer acres of tobacco will be planted in the Volunteer State this year...

Just five crops (corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat) receive 93 percent of payments for commodities, which have averaged about $20 billion a year. This artificial "gigantification," though, has encouraged dependency, pushed out small farmers, and raised land prices such that new farmers are finding it hard to get started. The subsidies also distort global agricultural markets, putting the US at odds with its trading partners and hurting poor farmers abroad. Originally, federal...

Still, some experts warn that the price has nowhere to go but down if the market is flooded, and not everyone has forgotten how a massive grain deal with the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and the 1996 drought in China shot corn prices to record highs prices that later wilted. Still, some experts warn that the price has nowhere to go but down if the market is flooded, and not everyone has forgotten how a massive grain deal with the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and the 1996 drought in...

soybean acreage is expected to slide 11 percent and cotton production 20 percent this year alone, the Agriculture Department said. They worry, too, about ethanol's fuel efficiency lower than traditional gasoline and its effects on the environment and food prices as corn chews up more farmland. The 58-year-old Adams, who works 950 acres in central Illinois, didn't immediately join the farmer cooperatives pooling together to build a 100-million-gallon-a-year ethanol plant. The...

The governments tight budget has some farmers and lawmakers looking at redirecting some of the fixed annual payments that go to grain and cotton growers. Li'lBeaver there is enough fat in the food system to provide healthcare, educatoin on a student need basis and then the posibility of getting the troops out of Iraqi and be ready to prevent the next one, All at I would bet the same or lower food price in the stores except the Iraqi situation that is a big one. Ron Heck, a Perry farmer who...