I had a neighbor in O.P., who was the son of one of those impoverished Kansas farmers, who's father left his son a farm that was liquidated for 7 million bucks! Poor struggling farmer them?!

Hey, when there is little to no risk of crop loss breaking you & forcing you to sell off some of your land ( like any other business that takes a risk ).... or property taxes to pay on the land that you accumulate ( that will never finance local schools & services ),..........? do you think happens?!

They get rich & others pay for the Federal & State systems that reward them & their heirs.

Don't mind others getting rich if they can "game the system"! After all, that's the "Merican Way"!

What i don't like is their self serving / self righteous right-wing-nut-political-attitudes about the rest of us, who provide them with government sponsored job security, tax welfare & inheritance schemes!

If the reader is some farmer right-wing-nut;....Well,.... this is what it sounds like to have to listen to people who consider you to be the next version of "welfare mother", that you all like to whine about so much, in your right-wing-nut-rants....... & it isn't fun,.... is it?!

I'm tired of our state politics where the rural pot calls the city kettle.... black, ....all of the time

http://www2.ljworld.com/propertyvalues/?q=Nunemaker

Read it and weap.....so many pieces of property held by an impoverished fool....

Man, to hear some of you guys tell it, the farmers are out there rolling in a $250,000 Bently, living in a two million dollar house, with a sea side winter home in Miami Florida complete with a 40 foot yaht.

I would encourage some of you moron desk jockeys who like statistics to go spend a month with a farmer and see for yourselves just how easy that life is, working cattle, milking them, cutting hay, moving and throwing hay, installing and repairing miles of fence, working on equipment that could easily take your hand off or crush you, working the same ground 3-4 times a year, cutting and planting crops and doing it while working around mother natures scheadule, enduring the most extream heat and cold temps from one year to the next, inconsistant fuel prices, constantly patching up and repairing equipment, working 12-15 hours a day, and the list goes on.

Man farming is so dang easy and the money is so good, who wouldn't want to be a farmer? I think everybody should be a farmer its so easy.

I know quite a few farmers in Franklin and Douglas Conty and they are the hardest working individuals I have ever met. I will never forget the day a year or so back that I stopped to talk to one of them who is 80 years old and he was unloading a pallet of 50 pound bags of corn seed like it was nothing. Farming is hard work and all the farmers I know have my respect.

According to Feed The Children, an American based aid organization that provides food to Americas' starving poor, the largest racial group dealing with starvation in America, is not urban blacks,..... but poor rural whites! Does that Challenge a myth or two?

Considering the nature of "right-wing-nut-rural-politics",.... that is believable!

Of course, the rural farm right-wing-nuts would have us believe that all of Americas social ills have come to us thanks to the poor & minorities, who are congregated in it's largest cities.........Right?!

They don't make meth or moon shine down on the farm,..... or grow weed?.....Right?!

I don't hate farmers..... but some of them act like middle eastern religious nuts with their "psycho-religious-politics-of-divine-entitlement", in a world populated by others, whom they believe that they have the divine rights, to treat like religious infidels.... or sheer dummies & "City Rubes," that they fool with their feigned religious piety!

At least these people are working hard

To set record straight note enormous growth of Food stamps: Food stamp usage is at record levels according to the New York Times, with one in eight Americans now receiving benefits. The dramatic rise in spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as the Food Stamp program until 2008 when Congress changed its name to sound more palatable.-appproximately 40 billion annually beginning of 2009 to almost 75 billion end of 2011

davidmcg1 note above:

"....guess where most of the aid goes? It goes to subsidize that lunch your city and rural kids are eating at school and most of the rest goes to the SNAP card system (food stamps)......".

Utter nonsense. The SNAP (AKA: Foodstamp Program) is NOT set up to help poor people eat! It's set up part and parcel with price supports and price subsidies to phat cat farmers! If the SNAP (AKA: Foodstamp Program) stopped today, trust me, poor people'd find a way to eat....even if it meant hitting people over the head with a lead pipe......; however, were the USDA subsidy system to stop today, these WELFARE recipient "farmers" would begin to understand the meaning of loss.

Top it all off.....In 2000, Congress prohibited public disclosure of the names of farmers who receive subsidized crop insurance, a program that has quadrupled in size since 2002, to $9 billion last year. The Congressional Budget Office projected the program will cost $90 billion in the next decade. The cost to taxpayers of the current crop insurance system has soared from $2.4 billion in 2001 to nearly $9 billion in 2011 as a result of high commodity prices and the generous premium subsidies that lead farmers to buy the most expensive insurance available.The Congressional Budget Office predicts that taxpayers will spend $90 billion over the next ten years on the highly subsidized insurance program – far more than $66 billion the CBO predicts will be spent on traditional farm subsidies.

From a July 10, 2012 article:

On the same day that the House will vote to end health insurance subsidies for low income Americans, the House Agriculture Committee will vote to increase crop insurance subsidies for the largest and most profitable mega farms – and will cut nutrition assistance programs to pay for it.

Many of the same House Agriculture Committee members who will vote tomorrow (Wednesday) on a proposal to increase crop insurance subsidies voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2009, including Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN). Other members of the House Agriculture Committee who are expected to support unlimited insurance subsidies for corn and cotton farmers tomorrow but voted against health insurance subsidies for low income Americans in 2009 include Reps. Tim Holden (D-PA), Larry Kissell (D-NC), and Mike McIntyre (D-NC), as well as Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Tim Johnson (R-IL), Steve King (R-IA), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), Michael Conaway (R-TX), Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Glenn Thompson (R-PA), and Thomas J. Rooney (R-FL).

Unlike the health insurance subsidies included in the Affordable Care Act, crop insurance subsidies are not subject to any limits on who can receive subsidies or the amount they can receive......Roughly 30,000 policyholders collected 42 percent of all premium subsidies in 2011. http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2012/07/insurance-for-corn-not-kids/ is the source

davidmcg writes above: "Then don't drive a car. The gas has corn in it....."

Not by my choosing the farmers lobby had our wonderful legislature passed a law a few years back that permits gas stations to sell gasohol without telling you, provided the amount of corn alcohol is 10% or less. Who wants it or needs it? It's been proven time and again that corn ethanol costs more to produce than it delivers in energy. Of couse what few know is that the very "farmers" who grow the crud also own the local ethanol producing plants around these here parts. They done got a good racket and suckered the American and Kansas public big time. WELFARE. Follow that dollar.....find the hack hick.

"According to the National Weather Service, just 0.18 of an inch of rain fell in Lawrence between June 1 and July 12. That’s 5.5 inches less than average."

That's not true. It is showing 1.56 inches in June and we're at 0.58 in July.

Well, it is ironic to listen to "some" Rural Framer Types bitching about the welfare state mothers & see them backing heartless pseudo-religious "clown" politicians, that always seem to target the poor or disabled anywhere but i guess that they are afraid that if every small business & minor person got the same breaks, as they do from the government, that there would be less for themselves to take, at the expense of others who are out there.

And of course,..... more risk!

I guess that it helps to wrap yourself in God & the Flag when securing a better deal for yourself, than for others, whom you decide, on your own, are less deserving.

I don't hate farmers but i disagree with the right wing policies of some of them, that are just plain hypocritical / "me first & selfish", in the light of day.

There is nothing wrong with a little "TABLE MANNERS" when it comes to the rest of this country who aren't farmers holding land riches!

Well. i guess what do we expect from people who can eat the family pet & think nothing of it?

What would we say to the head of Investment Bank, Goldman Sachs, if he tried to justify an annual bailout of his company because we all bail out farmers who's crops fail annually.

Failed regular banks are routinely taken over by the FDIC and sold to someone else who picks up & pays off the costs of their underinsured accounts, as a part of the deal.

Isn't any business always a risk taking adventure,...... that's what managing a bank or a farm is all about......or even having a life to begin with doing something else......like a military career or a job as an underground coal miner! Risky!

I don't think that it is unfair to remind right wing farmers that the rest of the world is their market & that treating the poor of Kansas as well as they treat the rich, politically, is a good idea, if you are as dependent on the governments good will, as you all obviously are.

And in the mean time the Corps is draining our Kansas Water Reservoirs to ship grain, soy bean, or whatever, in barges down the Mighty Mo., & onto New Orleans, for export.

All in the face of an agricultural disaster!

A couple of more years of this and things could get badly interesting!

.

Poor ole Nunemaker-ross Inc received payments totaling $1,068,992 from 1995 through 2011 in federal WELFARE payments.....and that don't include the crop insurance subsidies which amount to a tidy little sum. Alceste do think Nunemaker and Ross'll both survive.....and nicely at that.....

Here are the FACTS from ewg.org : http://farm.ewg.org/persondetail.php?custnumber=A06794798

When is Brownback, Roberts, and Moran going to do something about all these WELFARE recipients?????