2018 Farm Bill: What shiny object will be used to distract this time?

During these last 30-plus years, farmers and major farm and commodity organizations, abetted by agribusiness, have gone after one shiny new thing (policy) after another, often that border on entrepreneurial rent seeking, while playing the sympathy card of public support for family farmers and the agrarian ideal. Our main theme in this series is that farmers and farm and commodity organizations have consistently ignored the economic characteristics of grain production that result in long periods of low prices punctuated by brief periods of high prices and, every few decades, with longer periods of high price that are the direct, disruptive result of government policies in this country or elsewhere in the world.In the first two months of writing this column in 2000 we laid out our understanding of the fundamental economic characteristics of agricultural production. Over the years we have repeatedly described a set of policies that take into account the root causes of chronic price and income problems faced by farmers—that is policies designed to respond to the economic characteristics of primarily, but not limited to, grain agriculture, providing a policy environment in which market forces would allocate supplies among competing uses, and result in minimal governmental costs, while protecting farmers on the low side of farm commodity prices and consumer from the high side. At the same time, we have criticized policies that treat the symptoms rather that respond to the causes of the farm price and income problems.