DEAR EDITOR:

I watched an episode of the CBS Farm Show in February which featured a vegetable grower from the Salinas, Calif., area. Although he grew lots of tomatoes, I was surprised at how little he received for all the hours and hard work he applied to making a living. He received a measly nickel per pound, the highest amount of money per pound he ever received.

To gross $50,000 he had to sell 1 million pounds of tomatoes.

In his nearby grocery store the price was 99 cents per pound. Last summer I paid $2 for one large tomato at the farmers market and $10 for two tomato plants at a local outlet.

In 2007 there were 1,207 farms in Mercer County and a few farmers received as much as $250,000 a year but a lot received zilch from U.S. government subsidies.

According to Google, the median income for a farm was $150,000 but taxable income averaged about $30,000 after paying for labor, seed, fuel, fertilizer, buildings, feed, very expensive farm machinery, utilities, etc.

The Hightower Lowdown newsletter ran a couple of eye-opening articles about beef production this year. The meat industry is dominated by the Big Four: Smithfield, Cargill, Tyson and JBS, the Brazilian company with nine gigantic meat packing facilities in the U.S. and which does business with 102 nations.

The average beef steer weighs about 1,200 pounds and costs about $1.50 a pound to raise.

The Big Four are often the only bidders and JBS has often bid only $1.30 a pound.

The farmer / seller loses .20 x 1,200 or $240 per cow, and when you have to sell 100 at a time, you’ll lose $24,000.Though the Big Four have tripled their profits, they somehow get millions in subsidies each year under the U.S. Farm Bill.

JBS has averaged a U.S. handout of more than $20 million per year. Is that fair or right?

Do they and the others have to feed out of the Big Ag Trough? How about saving the family farmer for a change?

The farm bill is up for renewal this month.

Will we ever have a national farm bill that gives more help to family farmers than to rich corporate farming?

Did you notice that Wall Street is buying hundreds of thousands of American farmland? It’s not to harvest crops, but to monopolize water rights, to sell at a profit to farmers who desperately need water.

Contact your representatives in Congress to recommend cutting subsidies and tax breaks to the wealthy if they truly want to balance the budget, instead of punishing Americans and holding all of us hostage.

ROLAND CURRY

Sharon, Pa.