> The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher. Is it that our corn production is naturally very high, and so we subsidize it

> The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher. Is it that our corn production is naturally very high, and so we subsidize it more? Or is it the other way around? My understanding is that a lot of corn uses were developed in part because of corn subsidies and requirements around ethanol. As corn became an extremely cheap material, people started looking for uses for it. And you can quickly enter a spiral there, where as corn becomes more useful, we subsidize it more, which encourages more companies to figure out how to make more stuff out of corn. > That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace. It feels like this has looped around and that the current balance of subsidies are no longer about disaster planning. If your starting premise is that we're trying to keep production local (or at least, production capabilities local), and you're also saying that during disaster periods we can pivot to more necessary crops -- then what is the problem with changing how our current subsidies right now are distributed to encourage different crops? What do we lose? I am skeptical that a dairy farm is going to be able to quickly shift to planting potatoes or grain, it probably doesn't have the equipment or the right land to do that. But taking your argument at face value and assuming they can make that pivot, then we could also collectively decide as a society that we produce too much meat/grain as a nation during times of peace, and we could collectively decide to subsidize local production of more diverse foods. We could subsidize the same number of farmers to produce different things.