Phillip Bowles

How did you get into cotton?

This was a family business that had been around for a long time; I’m the fifth generation in my family. And cotton began to be grown in the 1920s, and the advent of mechanized picking after World War II is what really opened the door to make it a major cotton state.

Do you enjoy your work?

Yeah. Farming is pretty special. It’s one of those things, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but if you don’t feel called to it you shouldn’t do it, you get your head handed to you too many times. But it’s fascinating, at least the way it’s done in California, because it involves natural science, politics, markets, labor relations, environmental issues, water issues. It’s a great agriculture, at least in California as I know it, is a terrific place for a generalist to work.

It seems like it would be good for keeping the mind sharp.

Yeah, it’s not just growing crops, that’s the part. If you talk to a doctor, and if all being a doctor was talking to sick people and helping them feel better, then everybody would want to be a doctor; it would be great. But that’s a little part of what you do. A doctor has to deal with the insurance company and the nurses that want to go on strike and the hospital administration, and all the other things that are part of the doctor business. It’s not just holding the hands of sick people.

Farming is the same way. Growing crops is great, it’s fabulous to be out here and see all of the machines go back and forth and dig holes in the ground and play with all these neat toys.

But there are hundreds of people that expect a living out of our company, and that doesn’t just happen on its own.

Well, from the looks of it, it’s a pretty good crop. Could you speak to that?

Yes. From an agricultural standpoint, this has been an excellent year. We had an early spring and moderate summer weather and very little insect pressure and beautiful harvest weather. I mean, you really feel greedy to complain anything about a year like this. They don’t happen all the time.

Where do you suppose most of this cotton growing behind you is going?

I would guess 89 percent of it is going to be exported. The domestic mills have very little use for our type of cotton. They’re stuck in a time warp from a long, long time ago.

But this cotton, it varies from year to year; the majority of it will go to the Far East, some will go to northern Europe, and some will go to Mexico, Central America. But the California industry has been entirely [unintelligible] handed for years and years and years, and we grow a very high-quality, specialized crop that we’re constantly improving and listening to what the foreign buyers want. And in fact, we even had a law for many years governing the types of cotton that could be grown in California. The law was overturned, although the basis is still in effect.

There’s a board that certifies certain varieties of cotton that can be labeled as California, [CALA] cotton, which is just a term of art that we use. A buyer knows, halfway around the world, a buyer knows if it comes with that California Cotton Board approval that it’s an extremely high-quality uniform cotton that has desirable dying and spinning characteristics.

Whereas, it being a natural crop, you could just be taking a crapshoot; you buy a bale, well, it’s classed this way and it’s graded that way, but you don’t really know if it’s like wine, you know. Just because a wine has a label on it doesn’t necessarily mean much.

Let’s go to subsidies. I read something where you talk about the subsidy system being misguided. Can you speak to that?

Well, it is a subsidized crop; that’s definitely true. Why it’s subsidized is a very good question. They don’t seem to be able to make up their mind as to why it’s determined some crops get subsidies, some crops don’t get subsidies. For the life of me, I don’t understand it. And even the objective of the crops that do get subsidies is if it’s for national security purposes, then there shouldn’t be any payment limits. Well, obviously, the more you grow, the more of a subsidy you should get, and the subsidy should be directed at the most efficient, low-cost producers of this incredibly vital, strategic crop.

Now, I don’t buy that argument, but that would be the logically consistent argument.

If it’s a rural welfare program, it’s a very odd welfare program because the benefits don’t go to poor people, they go to middle class people at least, and often somebody who’s far beyond middle class. There is a lot of rural poverty in this country and it needs to be addressed in many ways — probably not by handing out money, but certainly not by handing out money to a very tiny group of people who grow certain crops; that doesn’t do much for rural poverty. But otherwise, for the life of me, I have no idea why they do it.

Well, I asked Charlie Stenholm that question, and he said it’s to “level the playing field.” What’s that argument about?

We’re exporting. We don’t import very much cotton. Other countries grow cotton, some other countries support their cotton growers to one degree or another. If they want to drink the Kool-Aid, God bless them. They’ll be creating the same set of environmental and cultural problems that we’ve created in this country. I don’t see any great distortions in the world markets that way. We can produce cotton, at least here in California, the highest quality cotton probably in the world, probably at the very lowest cost in the world.

We have a terrific infrastructure to be able to deliver and get a uniform product delivered on time to somebody.

And if somebody else somewhere in the world can do that better, God bless them. That’s how the markets work. And if it turns out that we can’t grow cotton as profitably as I think we can, or we lose our leadership, that’s my problem; that isn’t your problem.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are going for these commodity crops that are being exported; how are those taxpayers benefiting from this?

Well, I would guess landlords and banks are probably benefiting from it; real estate speculators are benefiting from it.

Charlie made a blanket statement, “It helps with our balance of trade,” as though U.S. taxpayers should be thankful that billions are going to these particular crops because it helps our balance of trade. Do you understand that?

I understand that argument, that it helps our balance of trade, but my goodness, so these exports, billions and billions of dollars of all sorts of things, and to the extent that agricultural subsidies upset our trading partners and cause nations to erect barriers against American manufactured and value-added goods, I think that’s probably a pretty weak argument.

There is still great demand for American agricultural products, and there’s all kinds of American agricultural products, like alfalfa, that isn’t subsidized, that is exported, tomato paste that is exported, nuts that are exported.

There are very valuable crops that we grow very well in this country, and we seem to be able to export them all over the world. And in fact, we own the pistachio business worldwide in California because of the quality that we produce, and that’s not subsidized. They’ve developed a fantastic market for pistachios.

Would you be profitable and would you be exporting this crop without subsidies?

Oh, yeah. If we had not had the amount of domestic production that has been grown almost entirely to receive the subsidy over the past 10 or 15 years. We would have gotten a much better market price for the cotton that we grow and sell. That’s why I say I’m damaged by these subsidies, I’m not helped by them.

Do subsidies cause the need for subsidies?

Well, that’s the problem. They do cause their own need. They’re also very hard to give up. As I was saying, it’s like smoking; you know it’s bad for you, but it feels so good you don’t want to stop. It’s a tender trap that they get led into, and the biggest misconception is that it’s the “safety net.” Come on, farming is very risky and people need to develop ways to mitigate their risk. A government handout is a really poor way to mitigate your risk. There are lots of way that people have learned to mitigate risk, and all kinds of risky enterprises like putting on a Broadway show or owning a restaurant.

You sell shares in the thing to other people, you make partnerships, you do lots of other things.

In fact, with the risky crops like lettuce, we grow tomatoes, we do a joint venture with our neighbors because tomatoes are a very risky crop. We leave some money on the table but we mitigate our risk by 50 percent. There are all kinds of intelligent things that a market economy can come up with that will help people mitigate their risk if they’re farming. But the government comes in and crowds everybody out with their handout money.

What you wrote in that one paragraph, “Sure, there’s risks in farming; there’s also risk in a restaurant or putting on a Broadway show.”

There sure is risk in farming. But there’s also risk in just about any worthwhile enterprise, including running a restaurant or putting on a Broadway show. And when you do those things, you figure out the level of risk you can tolerate and you structure your business in a way to make it work.

What’s behind it? What keeps this system going?

I think we’ve created a nexus of dependency. In the Midwest, there are rules that go back to the Depression where you have banks that are very, very weak; they’re not allowed to have branch banking or big loan, be a couple hundred thousand dollars. We’ve built a whole system of people who are addicted to these subsidies, and they can’t stop the machine from going around and around and around. There are people that have paid too much for land because the land brought a subsidy with it, the banker lent money on that purchase because of the subsidy, and it’s this self-perpetuating machine that the only chance I see for it to be broken would be a time like now when crop prices are high and people can make a period of adjustment to start to restructure their business in a more logical way.

What goes on in shaping a farm bill?

As I said, I think a lot of it is asset-driven, a lot of it is people seeing the chance for an absentee landowner to get a lot better return because a portion of his or her holdings are guaranteed. One analogy I’ll use for agriculture is it’s like owning an apartment building, but this is a crazy apartment building because you don’t know how many tenants you’re going to have and what kind of rent they’re going to pay you until the end of the year. And there’s an apartment building across the street that’s all full of white-collar workers that pay their rent on the first of every month.

These two buildings should be valued very, very differently. But in the case of the crazy apartment building, instead of there being any incentive for the apartment owner to say, gee, maybe I should improve the quality of the tenant that I have or fix up the building a little bit so I get better people, or do something to steady this out, the government is handing them a check to make up for the fact that he’s got a crazy apartment building.

What’s going to turn it around? What’s going to break this cycle and make the next farm bill more enlightened than the last?

Well, I think they’re making some progress; I wouldn’t write it off completely, as depressing as this latest iteration appears to be. There are better conservation titles, there are some good things in this farm bill that they’re starting to realize. I think a lot of it has to be driven by the farmers themselves. They look around, and look at the people in farming who are actually being successful and making things that people want, innovating and stuff; they’re largely people who aren’t getting subsidies. And when the farmers start to wake up and realize this, which they are, I think that’s when the winds of change will start to blow.

But it is kind of a hard sell. And in a way, I kind of wish farmers were less popular. We have this iconic idea of a Norman Rockwell type of character that is just beloved by all Americans. They don’t really exist, but everybody’s like, oh, the good old farmer with his bib overalls and not all his teeth, and he’s kind of fat and he’s a good-hearted yeoman person and we need to help him out. I think if the general public thought farmers were a bunch of jerks, maybe they wouldn’t be so happy about giving them money. But they’re not a bunch of jerks; they’re wonderful people. They’re very hardworking and it’s a very hard business. They’ve just loved them to death.

So, it sounds like, as far as any change in farm policy it’s mostly a matter of farmers waking up and not so much a change in the way people run for office and who’s financing who?

Yeah. You can blame campaign finance on just about any piece of bad policy that comes out of Washington, and it’s kind of like blaming the weather. Yet I really think that this needs to be changed by the growers themselves growing up and realizing that they’re not being helped by these programs; they’re being hurt by these programs. They’re making land too expensive for young people to get started in farming, they’re mis-pricing assets, they’re stopping farmers from coming up with more progressive, interesting ways of organizing their business and attracting outside capital to help them with their risk profile.

But until they grow up, they’re going to keep getting their allowance from mommy and daddy.

What do you think of some of these good programs in the proposed farm bill? Do you use them a lot?

We use them a little bit. I think they’re a great idea, because there are a lot of environmental initiatives that are pretty low-tech solutions; things like riparian fencing and habitat zones to protect waterways that are not very complicated or expensive to do, but there’s no economic return to the farmer.

And for the government to come along with a cost share or to do something like that, I think that’s a fine way of using things. Otherwise they would spend the money on lawsuits and maybe they’d eventually win the lawsuit, and then how are you going to get — you can’t get blood out of a turnip. A lot of these guys don’t have money to pay for these improvements anyway.

It’s much better to use a little bit of public money on some things like that that are pretty inexpensive, low-tech things. Most farmers do have a conservation ethic and they want to try to preserve the habitat around the places that they live, they just don’t have a spare $20,000 or $30,000 for riparian fencing that will net them zero, and it’s kind of unreasonable to expect that they might do something like that.

But it’s a lot cheaper for the government to do that than it is to run a lawsuit.

Are these subsidies allowing us to have cheaper clothing? I mean, is that a way in which the public benefits?

That’s a really minor way. There’s a very good book called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy that goes into the whole complex model of what makes up the textile business. But the amount of cotton in your t-shirt, whether cotton costs $1 a pound or a dime a pound, wouldn’t affect the value of your t-shirt by a fraction. It’s the transportation, dying, cutting, sewing, marketing, all those things, that go into the cost of making a t-shirt.

I wish cotton were valuable enough that the cost of the cotton would affect the cost of your garment.

Would you be willing to say that the elimination of subsidies for cotton isn’t going to cause the cost of cotton clothing to go up, or to say whatever you believe in that regard?

I can’t see any way that eliminating cotton subsidies would affect the price of clothing in the United States, the retail price of clothing, one way or the other. It’s a much too complicated model.

So, this is not a commodity crop; it’s a specialty crop that’s grown for a very high quality, very discerning market. If Mr. Armani makes a shirt and there’s something wrong with one of the button plaquettes, he knows it. And he knows if he buys California cotton that it’s going to spin properly, and if he buys cotton from some other place, it isn’t.

How did it come to pass that those five main crops become program crops and then the type of food that we eat becomes specialty crop?

I think it probably had something to do with a couple of highballs and a late night in the Senate, because there’s absolutely no rhyme nor reason to it why some of these crops just turned out to be so-called program crops and others didn’t. I for the life of me can’t understand it. There’s no basis for it in economics or policy, but certainly it’s very much up to the farmer to make a low-value crop out of a high-value crop.

If a farmer wants to grow a low-value crop, he or she can do it by neglecting their business. But there is no crop that is inherently low value.

To what degree do you contribute to a PAC or to your own representative either in Congress in DC or in Sacramento? Are you active as a contributor to a political campaign?

Not really. Occasionally there will be an initiative that is meaningful to me or there’ll be a group that I’m involved with or support, and I’ll give that group some money. But individual politicians, most of the ones in our area are basically running unopposed, and if you give them money they just make mischief with it.

Charlie Stenholm, who’s now a lobbyist, he’s hoping that Hilary gets elected and he’ll become the new Secretary of Agriculture. He said that if California specialty farmers want a piece of the action, they need to get themselves a lobbyist and go to work.

Yeah, I had an interesting meeting; there were some people who wanted to do that on a national basis for alfalfa because alfalfa doesn’t use any nitrogen fertilizer, and they thought it would just be a dandy idea to pay alfalfa growers $10 an acre or something because of what their low impact is on the environment.

That’s a nice argument, I guess, and I suppose if someone wanted to give me $10 I’m not going to turn around and give it back to him, but it’s a way of thinking that just doesn’t resonate with me and it doesn’t resonate with the kind of business people that I see that are inventing these new uses and coming up with incredible new varieties of fruit and nuts and ways to package carrots and they’re not going to worry about getting some mooching handout from the government.

It’s way too much trouble, and it always comes at a price.

I understand the value of the growth of the organic industry and agriculture, and then you spoke to another model that could work in terms of the future sustainability of agriculture.

I think the farmer’s market local food business is fantastic. I shop at those places and I think it’s wonderful that people are getting more in touch with the kinds of foods that they want to buy and the idea that seasonal foods are more interesting than a uniform food. It is truly a luxury to be able to have the kind of food abundance and variety that we have.

But as far as the organic part of it goes there are really, in my mind, two things that are driving the desire for organics. One is a perceived food safety issue, a part of the people eating the food who imagine that there’s something dangerous in the conventionally grown food; a questionable argument, but that’s one that’s driving it. The second thing is a feeling that food that has been produced organically has been produced in a kinder, more sustainable way, the same way that you or I wouldn’t like to wear a pair of underpants that had been made by slaves. I don’t care how nice they were, they’d always feel tight and uncomfortable.

And those are perfectly legitimate ways for people to feel. I personally feel that the perceived risk from conventionally grown food is grossly overblown and in fact, as we found in many cases, organic food can be quite dangerous with E. coli and contamination and storage issues. But as far as the production of cotton, at least, I do take issue with people, like Patagonia, I think, has been very unfair in depicting conventional cotton production as a really destructive, nasty practice that you can help eliminate by buying organic cotton.

Nobody is claiming that organic cotton is any safer to wear; they simply want to buy it because they think they’re being more responsible and earth-friendly by buying organic cotton.

There are so many problems in the production of organic cotton in terms of lost yield, quality, nitrogen management, just a whole panoply of obstacles that are present in growing organic cotton that are not present in growing the vegetables, that I could see it happening.

But I think it’s an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist, and I think it’s up to the cotton industry to project to the consumer that, in fact, we are growing a crop in a sustainable, safe, responsible kind of way. I can’t speak for the cotton industry all over the world; I don’t know about the cotton industry all over the world, but I know about the way it’s grown in California.

We use integrated pest management and lots of responsible, safe practices that are sustainable and that aren’t hurting the earth, and I’m very proud of the way we grow our cotton.

I don’t feel like I’m committing any kind of an environmental crime, at least I don’t think so, but people have to know that. I mean, they see a poster, they see a picture of an airplane spraying something out and they go, oh my god, this is terrible. And actually, the more you come to know about organic production systems, they’re not necessarily that benign themselves. Agriculture is very disruptive. Somewhere a pasture had to be leveled, the trees had to be cut down, water had to be diverted; organic crops use all those things.

Organic crops use water; organic crops require trees to be knocked down. The only difference is that they don’t use pesticides and herbicides and chemical fertilizers. God bless them. There are some very good organic growers and we’ve learned a lot from them. A lot of the wine in California is not labeled organic but it’s grown in a process very close to organic, but they don’t want to lose their whole crop in the fall if they get a fungus outbreak, so they just won’t label it organic because once every five years, maybe, they’ll have to put a fungicide or something on it.

We’ve learned a lot from them, and they can learn stuff from us.

Because you’ve got a fixed environment. You’ve got an orchard or a vineyard that is really undisturbed. It’s planted and then you go through and you mow it or something; you don’t do much to it. The field crop, it’s never the same. You plant it, it’s harvested within six months, there’s machinery going through and cultivating and changing the system, the crop is there, the crop is gone.

And when you don’t have a steady state, it’s very, very difficult to get the proper biological atmosphere around there, where you have the predator bugs and the weeds under control and all the other things that you could manage in a much more efficient way in an orchard or a vineyard. And they have proven that orchard and vineyard yields, especially if you’re going for quality, orchard and vineyard yields can be very comparable to those of conventional.

But that’s not so much the case in other crops, and of course in the case of vegetables, they can charge a lot more for them and recapture that. In the case of cotton, they do get a little bit of a premium for organic cotton, but the overall market for organic cotton is so small, we really don’t know what the size of it is. I’m not opposed to it at all, but I am opposed to people trying to sell their product by saying that I’m a son of a bitch.

You mentioned that you’re letting certain areas of your property have natural growth, native or whatever, but it’s beneficial to certain types of bugs and you’re inoculating the population with the hayseed bugs that haven’t developed resistance and so on.

We use what’s called integrated pest management; in California it’s been a widely accepted practice for about 30 years, to use a new age word, a “holistic approach” to the entire population of insect pests that are in the field. Another thing that we do is something equivalent to the English hedgerow system, where we take uneconomic areas, little corners of fields and things that would be hard to farm anyway, and reestablish those as habitats. So, we get predator birds, we get insects — both predator insects and pest insects — living there, but it’s a pest insect population that hasn’t been sprayed.

And so it’s constantly there as a genetic background for the pest insects that are in the field so that they have a much harder time developing selective resistance to the materials we have to use.

How many of your fellow cotton growers use these practices?

I would say that everybody uses integrated pest management. It’s basically that’s the standard way of growing crops in California, no matter what your crop is. If you’re growing it conventionally, you’re using integrated pest management. I don’t think that’s true across the rest of the country, which is a shame. In terms of leaving the little strip areas and natural land and stuff, we’re probably a little unusual in that regard.

You mentioned that chemicals now are safer; could you speak to which ones are used in cotton and why you feel more confident that’s it not causing havoc to ecosystems?

Yeah. They’ve developed entirely new classes of insecticides and herbicides that work on biological processes inside the plant and inside the bug that don’t have an analog in the human system. The early herbicides worked on mitosis, which is very similar to human mitosis; the early insecticides worked on the potassium pump, which is very similar to the way the nervous system of a human works. In the case of these newer chemicals, they work on processes, cell structures like chloroplasts or growth processes or an enzyme process inside the plant that has no analog in the human, they’re not categorically safe, but they are categorically safer. And that is a real piece of progress.

Do they do well testing? Is the water table looking pretty good these days? Do people drink well water here?

Yeah. Our drinking water is well water and we have it tested once or twice a year. The biggest thing you’re looking for is E. coli, but yeah, they look for chemicals and other things in there, and thank god we don’t have groundwater pollution. And we’re pretty careful; we have very strict laws in this state about how — what chemicals can be applied and where they can be applied and what time they can be applied and all this sort of stuff. I’m not sure that’s the case across the country, but it’s the case in California.

In Iowa, if the groundwater gets much worse, there may be no technical fix for it. Given this situation, and apparently it’s not the same in the Central Valley.

Well, nitrate pollution is not unknown in California; it’s here, too. But we haven’t had the kind of crisis-level problems that you’re talking about.

In general, as you look at what’s going on in the Central Valley, what do you see in the future?

For years, until very, very recently, farming was exempt from the Clean Water Act, and nobody anywhere in the country really had to worry about the quality of their runoff. Now that’s beginning to change and all the farmers are wrestling with it. We don’t have a solution to many of these things. There will be solutions; part of it may be drip irrigation, part of it may be buffer zones, part of it may be changing some formulations of chemicals. But another part of it comes with the realization that we can’t have a zero tolerance for anything.

None of has a zero tolerance for anything in life; there’s some background level of risk and exposure to things.

You walk down the street in Manhattan and take a breath, you’re taking a breath of something; you’re not taking in pure Himalayan air, and that’s an acceptable risk that people have decided they can live with. You decide you want to drive your kids to the movies, and you drive them across town. There’s actually a very definable risk that a drunk driver will run a red light and kill you all, but you say no, the kids want to go see Hannah Montana, and we go see it. And it’s a calculation that we all make, and we need to think in those terms, too. I’m not trying to give agriculture or industry a free ride, but I think the consumer needs to realize that zero does not exist in nature.

I’m sure you’ve heard the whole discussion about a more diversified farm. Cotton is a monoculture and you’re growing it on a large scale; is there any way you’re ever going to grow your cotton organically?

It may be feasible, but I would differentiate between those two statements, though. It’s not a monoculture. We have crop rotation, there’s all different kinds of crops grown around here, and that’s part of the reason we get such good yields is we have both cotton and alfalfa and tomatoes and grain, and they work in a rotation with each other. And it’s an important part of our insect management and an important part of maintaining soil health and other things, so it’s far from a monoculture.

But in terms of the future of organic cotton, I don’t know. It’s up to the amount of consumer demand that there would be for it.

And I think people also need to take a very hard look at the environmental costs of growing cotton organically as opposed to growing it conventionally. I think you can make a very strong argument that for every gallon of diesel we use, for every foot of water that we use, we should be getting the maximum economic return. Organics doesn’t do that.

Organics may have fewer third party impacts, but it’s not efficient in terms of the economic value that we’re extracting from that diesel and that fertilizer and that water, and I don’t know what the right answer is, but people need to be asking that question.

Farmers in Iowa have been using Round-Up, and it’s killed all the weeds and natural growth that the Monarch butterfly and some of the bumblebees needed. They’ve seen drastic reductions in the number of songbirds, bees, etc.

Well, I wouldn’t blame it on Round-Up, first of and the bees, there’s a very odd virus that they seem to have found, there are these plagues that have affected bees for years, and bees are funny creatures, but we have lots of them here; they’re a very important part of our economy. But as far as the songbirds, I think part of it is that small grain production has gone away. There used to be much more small grain production in that part of the world, and that was something that songbirds would both nest in and eat.

That’s been replaced by corn and animals don’t eat corn, except chickens in pens, and that may have affected it.

And also, maybe they need to plant some more trees and stop knocking them down. A lot of times, you give a man a tractor and a chain and he’s got nothing else to do, he’ll go pull a tree down; it’s fun.

I think if they were to get rid of them completely, there would probably be about a year of some disruption as everybody had to adjust to the new situation, but I can’t imagine us going out of the cotton business; I think we would probably see a 15 to 20 percent increase in our cotton price and I couldn’t wait for the day to happen.

In terms of the consumer, I don’t think it would make any difference to the consumer one way or the other, and in terms of our supplier, the people who we sell to also buy their cotton from all over the world. If they can get a cheaper price and a better product from Brazil or Pakistan, they’ll do that. We sell to Brazil and Pakistan, and sometimes Pakistan sells to our customers. That’s the nature of world trade, and it sure beats any other system I’ve ever heard of.

You’re one of the more forward-thinking farmers we’ve spoken to, and you’re a cotton farmer. Do you feel like you get a bad rap?

No. Farmers love to feel sorry for themselves. I just think people need to take the time to understand these systems a little better. California cotton is not a commodity; it’s a highly specialized crop grown for a very high-value, specialized market that the California growers have developed themselves through breeding and advertising and listening to their customers, largely because we haven’t been affected that much, small in proportion to the size of the whole business that it hasn’t affected people’s planting decisions and purchasing decisions and so on here.

It’s affected us only indirectly by helping our competition do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. It damages us and I think that most California growers, when they sit back and think about it, realize that it’s damaging. But as I think I said, it’s like quitting smoking; you know it’s bad for you, but it feels so good you’ll do it tomorrow. It is hard to kind of think, oh, I’m going to jump out of the nest here, but just look around at your brothers and sisters who are growing all these other crops and doing very darn well, thank you very much, and they don’t get a nickel from the government.

We have to tell the average person on the street what a subsidy is. When your subsidies arrive, how does it come? Does it come in a check?

No, they make the programs so complicated partly to keep people from understanding them, I think. There is a check that comes once a year that just comes out of thin air for doing, as best I can see, nothing. But that does come in the form of money. But otherwise, the crop is subsidized in the price that we receive when we sell the crop to a merchant, some portion of that reflects a certificate that the merchant has used that then entitles him to do certain things.

And so he’s willing, but we have to grow the crop in order to get that part of the price enhancement.

There are various other payments that are given to people depending on the quantity of the crop that they grew in a given year, but for California those amounts are meaningless because almost everybody maxes out long before they’re eligible to receive those payments. I can’t give you a definitive answer how it works.

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