Tom Vilsack wants farmers to make more money.

On that point, most farmers would agree with the agriculture secretary. Farming has always been a gamble, with commodity and input prices rising and falling independently of one another, and the weather, over which no one has control, often deciding the outcome of each year’s work.

During the last two years, that dance of chance has spiraled beyond anyone’s forecasts. Because of the flu pandemic, war in Ukraine, drought and other factors, many farmers feel as though they have been through an economic spin-dry cycle. By and large, USDA has done a good job of helping them get through the last two years.

But we believe Vilsack’s concerns run deeper than economic turmoil.

“Just today (the Economic Research Service) issued a report in which it shows that for most U.S. farm families, off-farm income is the main source of income,” Vilsack told the American Farm Bureau convention last week in Puerto Rico.

There’s more to that story. The ERS defines a farm as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year.”

That huge umbrella includes not only small-scale farmers and ranchers but others who are “hobby farmers” and, in many cases, retirees who live on farms. This is illustrated by the following statement from the ERS.

“…In 2021, the average value of production from the 2 million U.S. farms amounted to $203,391,” according to the ERS. “However, few farms are near the average; half of the farms had production valued at $7,900 or less, and 69% of all production occurred on farms with at least $1 million of agricultural output.”

All of this is a way of saying the situation isn’t as bad as Vilsack maintains. He even said in his speech that last year farm revenue set a record. Our feeling is he is using statistics to make a case for a more intrusive USDA. By asserting that nearly half of all farmers are getting most of their income off the farm, he appears to be saying those farmers need more government.

It seems to us that the importance of the USDA is to make sure it has a robust crop insurance program that adequately and affordably covers every farm against disaster, and that the commodity markets operate with full transparency. That includes not only the livestock markets but the dairy markets and others that appear to be black boxes.

That way, all farmers can decide for themselves what to raise that will maximize their bottom lines.

Vilsack says he wants farmers to make more money through more revenue channels, including climate-related carbon markets that will pay them for sequestering carbon. That makes a lot of sense, and the USDA needs to help farmers and ranchers take advantage of those markets as soon as possible by laying the groundwork for determining how much carbon certain practices sequester.

USDA also needs to find a way to reward farmers and timber operators who for decades have sequestered carbon but are ignored by current markets.

And finally, USDA needs to stick up for farmers who are victimized by other federal agencies’ politically driven decisions. The latest Waters of the U.S. regulations and the growing number of bans of important pesticides are just two examples of how farmers can be hurt by the federal government even as USDA tries to help them.