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It might seem odd, this being July, but Burd is a farmer, and for many farmers spring lasts well into summer.

"Yesterday was my last 15-hour day for a while," Burd said on Thursday. Burd's farm, south of Uniontown in Georges Township, Fayette County, specializes in corn, hay and alfalfa, and when this time of year rolls around, he's done with planting and fertilizing. "Beginning tomorrow I'll begin working 10 to 12 hours a day, which will seem like nothing."

Like many other farmers, Burd is also awaiting the start of yet another federal farm program, this one replacing the much heralded Freedom to Farm Act. Passed by Congress in 1996, the Freedom to Farm Act was designed to wean farmers from federal price support payments. Even as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s faded into history, federal farm subsidies remained alive and well.

The Freedom to Farm Act, passed with bipartisan majorities, failed to stem the tide, or to rock the boat. In recent years, Congress passed a series of emergency farm bills worth billions of dollars, as drought and other hazards took a toll on farm income.

Burd is not surprised Freedom to Farm failed. Without subsidies, U.S. agriculture would find itself helpless in the international marketplace, and U.S. farmers would themselves fade into history.

"We have to decide in this country what we want," Burd said. "Our food system, which features three things — safety, low prices and quantity — is the envy of the world."

The choice comes down to a system thrown out of kilter by a hands-off policy by the government, Burd said, or the one that has served the country extremely well. "Do we want to be a people who buys the cheapest food without worrying where it comes from? Since 9-11, we have to ask ourselves, is that what we want? Or do we want a reliable food system, with food produced domestically?"

To Burd, the choice is clear. The market — and the vaunted law of supply and demand — doesn't work with agriculture, he argued. "Food is a tremendous bargain," he said. The old way is the best way.

John Lohr, executive director of the federal Farm Service Agency in Westmoreland County, said most local farmers welcome the 2002 Farm Act. Signed into law by President Bush in May, the bill provides $191 billion in subsidy payments to farmers over the next decade.

"That breaks down to an average of nearly $4,400 per tax-paying household," noted Brian Riedl, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, in an analysis for National Review magazine, one of a number of reviews by conservative commentators furious with Bush for breaking faith with the free enterprise system.

"Worse," Riedl continued, "two-thirds of all farm subsidies go to large farms and wealthy agribusinesses, most of which earn more than $250,000 a year. Among the landed gentry on the agricultural dole are 14 members of Congress, 15 Fortune 500 companies and celebrities such as Sam Donaldson and Ted Turner."

Lohr sees the legislation in a different light. The new farm bill is not entirely unlike Freedom to Farm, he said. "In essence, it's the same mechanism. Farmers will have to demonstrate a history of planting, a history of yield."

Lohr expects slightly more farmers to sign up for this bill than did for Freedom to Farm, which in Westmoreland County topped out at 80 percent. In addition to grain farmers, dairy farmers are included in the 2002 legislation.

"In simple terms, dairy will be treated just like grain," Lohr said. "There will be a target price, with the government making up the difference between the target price and the market price, if there is one."

Besides price support measures for an array of farm products, the bill requires participating farmers to take steps to preserve and nurture their land. This conserve-or-else edict has been a part of federal farm law for a long time. According to Lohr, the conservation measures farmers are expected to institute include crop rotation, contour plowing and the placement of terraces to hold runoff soil in place. While hardly mind-binders, these are measures farmers frequently fail to take, pressured as they are to squeeze as much productivity from their land as they can.

Actually, Lohr has a fairly complex view of the 2002 Farm Act. It will definitely help farmers, most of whom realize only a 2 percent return on their investments even in the best of times.

"Dairy farmers in 2001 should have had a good year," Lohr said. 2002 has been less profitable. "I bet any number of dairy farmers will tell you that they haven't seen prices this low since the 1960s."

Lohr said federal subsidies are "absolutely essential" for grain farmers' survival.

As it always does, Congress painted with a broad stroke, leaving it to bureaucrats in Washington to fill in the details. Information on grain subsidies, or the fine print for grain farmers, is just now trickling in, he said. And he has no information at all on the dairy support program. He promised that he and members of his staff will meet with farmers as information becomes available.

Despite these uncertainties, Lohr is certain of one thing: Checks to farmers will be in the mail come fall.

Lohr called the 2002 Farm Act a "primary-election farm bill" and a "political animal" from the get-go. Given more time, he feels Freedom to Farm would have worked, but Congress felt pressured to act now to maintain farm income. In states like South Dakota, the home state of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, income from wheat makes up the bulk of income for all wage earners, Lohr argued.

Andrew Place is a rarity, a first-generation farmer. Place raises livestock, mostly lamb, on his Greene County farm, a few miles north of Waynesburg in Washington Township. His "instincts," he said, tell him the new farm bill will be a "disaster," an opinion he felt certain his farm-neighbors do not share.

As a producer of wool, Place said he has firsthand knowledge of what can happen in a subsidy-free environment. According to Place, after wool subsidies were phased out several years before even the Freedom to Farm Act, the market price for wool "jumped up substantially."

The curtailment of subsidies also benefited slaughtered lamb income, Place said. When Congress subsidized less tasteful Western lambs, the result was detrimental to Eastern producers like himself, who found they had a difficult time, because of the cost differential, in selling their products to even East Coast restaurants. Turned off by the taste of Western lamb, consumers slowed down their purchases, Place said.

The end of the subsidy ticked up the cost of Western lamb. It did the same to Eastern lamb, but it also made Eastern lamb cost-competitive for the first time in a long while. The result was a return of Eastern lamb to the supermarket and to the restaurant table, Place said. Times were better.

Place is an internationalist, worrying about the impact of U.S. farm subsidies on Third World farmers. The present subsidized system, in both the United States and western Europe, locks struggling Third World farmers out of international markets, and it makes it harder for them to meet domestic food needs. At the same time, U.S. farm subsidies fail to meet the real needs of U.S. farmers. "These checks do not promote efficiency," Place said.

"I think we will see higher support prices," said Fred Slezak, a Salem Township grain farmer. "That's good in a way. But support prices can only do so much. What we want is a decent market price."

Slezak faults Washington for failing to follow through on promises to expand the worldwide market for U.S. farm products, noting that one-third of U.S. corn products has "to be exported." He charged that international agreements have failed to stem the tide of South American soybeans into the U.S. market. Brazil and Argentina, he said, enjoy an unfair advantage in one critical component of soybean production: the use of the herbicide known commercially as Round-Up.

Because those two countries in particular ignore the patent rights of the chemical giant Monsanto, their farmers utilize the spray at a cost far below what U.S. soybean growers pay. A gallon of farm-strength Round-Up sits on Slezak's shelf. It cost him $52.32. The same one gallon jug in Argentina might be as cheap as $4, Slezak said.

Slezak noted farmers are subject to the whims of nature. His farm sits close to New Alexandria. Five miles way, on the other side of town, is another farm. He visited that farm last week. "I walked in his cornfields and it made me sick to my stomach. He's in trouble, not enough rain. Rainfall is spotty," Slezak said.

It takes seven years for topsoil to fully recover after just one year of severe drought, Slezak said. His farm-neighbor faces the prospect of two consecutive years of slack rainfall. Under the circumstance, a crop subsidy is a necessity, he noted.

According to Riedl, the "Depression-era policy" encapsulated in the new farm bill "adds as much as 20 cents to the price of a gallon of milk."

U.S. consumers will end up paying "as much as three times the market price for some foods and foot the bill for export subsidies so that consumers in other countries can buy food for less than Americans pay," Riedl charged.

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