Anyone who has ever raised children has heard the phrase “It’s not fair!” It is typically delivered at high volume accompanied by stamping feet and clenched fists. It occurs when an injustice, real or imagined, has been visited upon the speaker. Fairness is an interesting concept. It is something everyone is in favor of but whose definition is rarely agreed upon. A Google search will produce over 17 million websites that deal with fairness, and most have a different idea of what fairness is. There is even a Fairness Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to fairness but, again, only as they define it. Farmers are very familiar with fairness because much of the time their idea of fairness is at odds with the rest of society.<br>
Fairness is often defined by what someone else has or does. If one child gets dessert and the other child does not, the parent will hear “It’s not fair.” <br>
Even if the second child has not finished their dinner, they will still see their treatment as unfair. Something similar happens in our society when one group gets something and another does not. The group left out will say it is unfair, discrimination, or persecution, and will likely file a lawsuit seeking equal treatment – even if there may be a reason they were not included. Fairness is a basic tenet of much of our public policy.<br>
Yet, when it comes to the treatment of agriculture, the normal rules of fairness don’t apply. Currently, the Indiana General Assembly is crafting the largest tax break in the state’s history by reforming the property tax system. The plan calls for giving homeowners a big tax break and capping their property tax at 1 percent of their home’s assessed value. <br>
Yet, under the same plan, farmers get much less of a tax break and their taxes are capped at a higher level than that of homeowners. “That’s not fair,” say farmers, whose farmland uses very few of the services the tax pays for by comparison to homeowners.<br>
When it comes to technology, farmers are also treated unfairly. Other sectors of business are encouraged to adopt the latest production technology to make products and services better and cheaper. Yet, when farmers use new technology to produce their products better and cheaper, they are told no, and in some cases have the technology removed. Take, for example, the use of rBST to produce milk or biotechnology to grow crops.<br>
The price of food is yet another example. Consumers who willing pay $10 a gallon for a bottle of water will angrily blame the farmer when the price of milk goes up, ironically due in part to the banning of rBST in milk production. The price of gasoline can almost double in a year’s time, but let the price of wheat, corn, and soybeans go to new highs and the farmer gets blamed for causing world hunger.<br>
Let the government spend billions of dollars to bail out homeowners facing bankruptcy due to subprime mortgages, and it is called compassion. But when a few celebrities get farm subsidy checks, it is time to scrap the farm program.<br>
It seems to me that if there a group of people who have the right to stand up, stamp their feet, clench their fists, and scream, “It’s not fair!” it would be the men and woman of American agriculture. We should not make agriculture a privileged class – they would not want that – but, in our attitudes and our policies, we must begin to bring more fairness to the treatment of the agriculture industry at both the state and federal levels.<br>

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 Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.