I'm not going to dismiss it outright, but I am mild-to-medium skeptical of this theory. Take a look at some of the recent years of subsidies listed on https://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&yr.... It's not just that we prioritize feed crops more than oranges, we also prioritize feed crops more than potatoes and root vegetables. Our corn subsidies are on average over twice as high as our wheat subsidies, and over 7 times as high as rice subsidies.

Even dairy consistently gets more subsidies than fruits and vegetables. Are we really just optimizing for a worst case scenario where we literally run out of food? Does it really make sense for us to say that during a famine or a drought that milk will be an efficient use of resources? Nobody is baking bread with canola seeds, is it really more important during a famine that we have canola oil than potatoes?

Maybe this is the result of a highly researched government program about how to survive a worldwide famine. But the numbers I'm seeing aren't doing a lot to convince me that famine planning is a more likely cause than lobbying.

The strategic goal of having domestic food production and growing specific foods don't necessarily go hand in hand. While it makes a lot of sense to counter a famine with potatoes, in normal times you want to mostly produce what your population consumes. The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher. The US produced 330 million tonnes of corn in 2009 [1] and just 55 million tons of wheat in 2012 [2] (that's the numbers I could easily find, and unfortunately they seem to use slightly different types of tons which differ by ~10%, metric system anyone?). Taking this into consideration, wheat subsidies are actually a bit higher per ton produced than corn subsidies.

The US consumes a lot of corn, either directly through corn sirup, or indirectly through meat. So it does make sense to have a significant amount of domestic production of what your population actually consumes. That corn might not be healthy is another important topic on it's own.

So subsidizing local farmers isn't the same thing as optimizing for a worst case scenario. In case of a large-scale multi-year war that triggers a famine, you could still order your farmers to switch to growing potatoes, when you have enough actively harvested farmland to begin with. That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.

But I'm not saying that's the only reason for the subsidies. Lobbying definitely plays a big (the biggest) role and the largest industries have the strongest lobbying power. But when you have the strategic argument in hand, lobbying for subsidies becomes a lot easier, especially in a country that spends more on the military than any other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_production_in_the_United...

> The corn subisides are much higher, because the corn production is much higher.

Is it that our corn production is naturally very high, and so we subsidize it more? Or is it the other way around?

My understanding is that a lot of corn uses were developed in part because of corn subsidies and requirements around ethanol. As corn became an extremely cheap material, people started looking for uses for it. And you can quickly enter a spiral there, where as corn becomes more useful, we subsidize it more, which encourages more companies to figure out how to make more stuff out of corn.

> That means subsidizing what is actually consumed during times of peace.

It feels like this has looped around and that the current balance of subsidies are no longer about disaster planning. If your starting premise is that we're trying to keep production local (or at least, production capabilities local), and you're also saying that during disaster periods we can pivot to more necessary crops -- then what is the problem with changing how our current subsidies right now are distributed to encourage different crops? What do we lose?

I am skeptical that a dairy farm is going to be able to quickly shift to planting potatoes or grain, it probably doesn't have the equipment or the right land to do that. But taking your argument at face value and assuming they can make that pivot, then we could also collectively decide as a society that we produce too much meat/grain as a nation during times of peace, and we could collectively decide to subsidize local production of more diverse foods. We could subsidize the same number of farmers to produce different things.

I think you'll find it's largely due to historical precedent and lobbying.

Very much the government altering the free market. Corn subsidies are not without their consequences. Cattle do not live healthily on corn. People don't do so well on corn syrup either.

I'm not a huge fan of reducing my own meat consumption but think the government should stop subsidizing these industries.

The UK quite correctly determined during WWII that to feed the population during a blockade, it was much more efficient to eat potatoes and peas and so on directly and make bread from wheat, than it was to feed livestock for meat and dairy.

That is as true today as it was back then. Especially when you're feeding the cattle soybeans, which are perfectly good food for humans.

>Maybe this is the result of a highly researched government program about how to survive a worldwide famine. But the numbers I'm seeing aren't doing a lot to convince me that famine planning is a more likely cause than lobbying.

Your skepticism is warranted. After all, we had a highly researched government program about how to effectively tackle a worldwide pandemic, and... well.

> t's not just that we prioritize feed crops more than oranges, we also prioritize feed crops more than potatoes and root vegetables

Root vegetables don't have much calories. So this would actually make sense.

Root vegetables absolutely do have high calories.

People aren't going to live a year without fresh fruits without riots, but if you want a strategic reserve it should be potatoes.