“Looking back on their hardships,” he reflected, “I’ve come to believe that no one ever paid more for land than the people who got it for free.”

His portrayal of “free land” shows homesteading in an honest light; very few possessed the right mix of luck, guts and desire to prove their claim.

Far more were beaten and broken by it than succeeded in it. It’s a classically American story, though; we create glowing semi-myths on the success of a few and rarely look into the shadows to see what happened to everyone else.

Free trade is today’s homesteading bonanza; America’s farmers and ranchers, to hear most farm groups tell it, are going to cash in globally if they help push the now-stalled free trade train out of the station.

Daryll Ray, of the University of Tennessee’s Ag Policy Analysis Center, reminds everyone that we’ve heard this “all-we-need-is-market-access” talk before.

“World exports of major crops have continued to increase over the last two-and-a-half decades while the volume of U.S. exports have fallen to 80 percent of their 1979-81 levels,” Ray recently pointed out. The winners in the ag export game - like in almost any other once-dominant American industry - have been “our developing country competitors (that) have seen a three-fold increase in the volume of their exports of 15 major crops” during the same period, he points out.

Moreover, the Argentinas, Brazils and Chinas around the world “have done this even though, over the last two decades, we have reduced loan rates... eliminated set-asides, and shifted to ‘market-oriented’ decoupled (farm program) payments.”

Sober up, Ray says, because the reality of today’s ag trade makes it “far from clear that market access is our major problem.”

Besides, he adds, if we succeed in gaining our precious “market access” - by conceding steep cuts in farm program spending - “those same developing countries that have devoured the growth in worldwide markets ... will use any newly increased market access as opportunities to further expand their export volumes.”

Such fact-based shots of reality, however, fail to cure the big farm groups of their free trade fever. They still believe unrestricted free trade is your path to free land.

Until, of course, they run into a White House willing to cap trade-distorting U.S. farm program payments at $14 billion per year rather than today’s $23 billion.

When those numbers were tossed about in the latest round of World Trade Organization talks in Geneva last month, 12 free-trade talking American farm groups fired off a letter to the White House sternly condemning the offer.

That, too, is reality: When faced with truly free, or at least freer, trade, most of its most outspoken proponents begin whimpering for protection.

Witness the U.S. pharmaceutical industry’s carve-out in 2005’s Medicare drug benefit; a $100-billion-per-year slam-dunk handed to Big Pharma when Congress - dominated then by fierce free-trading Republicans - and the White House banned imported drugs from the program.

U.S. agriculture owns similar carve-outs; high tariffs on imported ethanol, for one. That’s not protectionism, say farm groups who preach free trade while lobbying for government hand-outs; that’s national security policy.

No, that’s double-talking baloney.

But, hey, it makes little difference to me whether they slice their free trade baloney thick or thin. I just want them to stop calling it a free lunch because, as my Kansas friend noted, free trade, like free land, isn’t free.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Alan Guebert may write to him in care of this publication.