Losing Ground

I just watched Losing Ground by EWG.  I have to say that I'm not really impressed.  If I were sitting in a DC beltway suburban townhouse, far removed from any modern farm ground, and watched this video I'd think that Iowa is washing into the sea.  But looking out my Iowa farmhouse window, I see that all of my neighbors must be the heroes that the video describe as the few.  It must be somewhere else that farmers are running the ends of their planters off the sides of embankments so that corn can fall into creeks, streams and rivers.  While I will grant you that many of the farms in Iowa do lose soil to wind and water erosion by the very nature of row cropping vs grasslands or hay ground, every farmer I know couldn't afford to let their soil run off of their land to the extent that this video purports.  I will also say that I think many farmers can do much more than they do without taking a financial hit, but in reality it already makes economic sense to stop erosion from your fields.  It already makes economic sense to harvest all of the crop that you plant.  But it makes economic sense (though there may be a moral argument to be made) to take the subsidies that are handed out for production, and they aren't mutually exclusive.  I agree that subsidies aren't fair and are setup to encourage production which can lead to a type of mining of the land (I don't know any farmers who want to mine their land), but the dilemma is more complex than EWG want people in the USA to think about.  America is accustom to cheap food, and food comes from the commodities of corn and beans (See King Corn).  Commodities are only cheap if they are in excess.  If the government has chosen to make food i.e. commodities cheap, then the extension of that policy is subsidies which rewards expanding even when prices are below the cost of production.  And really this is also good for those politicians who support this policy because they can collect the large Ag lobby money which further reinforces the politician's Ag policy.  Now as prices for corn and beans have risen recently, and by extension food costs are rising, if prices keep going up it's a great time to try to look at what expensive food feels like, to understand the complexity of commodity farming, and make decisions for going forward.