New Style Farming ?

I grew up on a farm , and remember - even now - what back-breaking work it was: freezing cold in the winter,suffocatingly hot in the summer ; spending hours every day cleaning out piles of manure, helping spread it on our fields and gardens , and trying to scrub the smell of it off our bodies.

Now, it appears, the US Department of Agriculture has been sending checks to dead farmers  - not just a few thousand dollars worth , but billions !

I don't know.

Dad belonged to the Grange. My brothers and I were all in 4-H. We got "The Rural New Yorker" and other farm magazines on a regular basis . We all knew about contour plowing , the finer points of dairy cattle , and "what to do till the vet arrives" ...but nobody mentioned post-mortem subsidies ; and, if anyone was collecting them,they stayed mighty quiet about it !

I don't know which is worse: knowing about these subsidies-or knowing you are at least 50 years too late to cash in on them !