We have definitely paid farmers and land owners to plant worthless pine trees in otherwise productive tillable acres. Never made sense to me. But here we are.
Nobody made them plant trees. That was the owner's decision to take the land from rowcrop production (in most cases) and plant a different cover. Some could have been grasses, others required trees. They could have elected to keep the ground in rowcrop production. Nobody twisted their arm.
He didn't say anyone made them do it. He said that they PAID them to. Is that a fact or not? I'm not a farmer or a forester so I'm asking a serious question. Were they paid by the USDA or some other government agency to plant pines instead of row crops?
And what about CRP land? Have they been paid to let fertile ground sit idle?
There's been all sorts of programs through the decades to pay landowners to convert row crop land to something else. The CRP paid landowners an amount per acre per year to not plant row crops. That's a different program from the ones that reimbursed landowners for planting pine trees. I don't think any of those programs are still paying for planting loblolly pine, but there are several that will pay for longleaf. I hate to see good fields that I worked in as a boy now growing loblolly pine, but it was the landowner choice to do it. I don't know if they would have without the government incentive.
I don't know if any crops have been ordered plowed under in recent years, but it happened some long ago and the stories remain. Most of the time it involved a farmer having an "allotment" of a certain number of acres for growing a specific crop. The government would pay the farmer up front to plant his allotment, and if he exceeded it, the extra had to be plowed under. People got mad about the waste, but it was due to the farmer breaking his contract. It seems like I remember other programs that required crops to be plowed under, but I can't remember the specifics.
I remember a case that we studied in one of my classes at Auburn in the 70s regarding a farmer with a wheat allocation. He greatly exceeded his allotment, but refused to plow it under because he wasn't going to sell the wheat, he was going to feed it to chickens. The government wouldn't buy that, and they went to court, and the farmer lost. He was so mad that he sold his farm and moved to Australia.
Farm programs have always been very political and I don't think they have benefitted the nation the way they were intended. They were justified on the idea of protecting our food supply. I wonder how safe it is going to be going forward.
