Farming to my dad is not guaranteed and because he is a cash cropper, he held a regular job until retirement.  Blue collar worker who understood that just because his father was a farmer it doesn't mean it's his right to be one.  But I see farmers who refuse to adapt, who were the impression that they don't have to change.  That doing the things, and growing this or that crop, doesn't need to every change because someone will be happy to cut them a check when their view is proven unprofitable, year after year.

My dad got rid of the animals, no money in them and a ton of work, and he has switched crops so many times over the years, because the same crop isn't always going to be the best fiscal crop.  Right now he's mostly soybeans, and I asked him a couple of years ago if he ever had edamame, never heard of it, when I explained, he explained that he plants a different type of soybean, not for human consumption.  That 10 years ago, he didn't know a soybean from a magic bean.  But when he saw the yields and prices, he got to know the bean.

But the point here is my dad would grow weed if that is where the market was headed, whereas the neighbors who were foreclosed, only did the exact same thing their parents did.  They always had the best gear and a state of the art farm, my dad doesn't own a tractor younger than me at 44, and his barn is basically a storage place, and the only animals he has are cats because they like mice.

My point, subsidies prop up a form of farming that doesn't want to change and adapt.  Not saying they should go, but like any other industry, they do hamper the natural way of things, the market if you will, and for what, because farming is American ?  Otherwise it doesn't make sense to pay people not to grow crops, when they could easily switch to a profitable crop.

It's not that simplistic, but when you grow up watching some succeed and some fail and you realize that most of the failures were due to people simply uninterested in self sustaining, they just wanted to farm the way they wanted to farm and that is a shame.

No one should be proud of taking subsidies, it's one thing to need help from time to time, especially in an industry where whether is root of all things, but to run a business that would essentially be a failure, year after year, without financial help, is wrong.  There is no right to farm.

Second, the problem people like Ernst have is that if they tell an honest story, it boxes them into a position they don't want to take, and an admission they don't want to make - because both interfere with their political ideology.

Ernst could tell a compelling and honest story.  She could talk about how hard it is for the small farmer to make a living, and that the subsidies her family was able to take advantage of allowed her to grow up and have a life that wasn't one of deprivation.

But how do you do that and in the next breath talk about how you hate subsidies - AND say that you'd vote to keep them anyway?

Have you really looked at the whack-a-doodle things Ernst has said?  She's Sarah Palin on the Prairie, and for the life of me, I have no idea why you feel she needs to be defended for operating straight out of the Big Playbook of GOP Hypocrisy.  This is the kind of BS that should be called out, not defended.

Is that a Southern thing?