It would do better to stop with all the grants, loans and subsidies and just use its long dormant anti-trust laws to create a truly competitive marketplace for those with crops and livestock to sell. That, combined with some straightforward payments for preserving environmentally sensitive lands, would bring more benefit to all concerned at much less cost to the taxpayer.

Well, more benefit for everyone but the global agribusiness corporations. They are the politically powerful interests that count on federal aid to keep farmers and ranchers barely in business, feeding ever-glutted grain and livestock markets with super-cheap raw materials for their industrial food processing chains.

One example of how things are so off kilter was the Washington Post story published in Thursday's Salt Lake Tribune. That's the one about tons of powdered milk, bought by the federal government in an effort to keep milk prices high, given to cattlemen to make up for the lack of forage in drought-stricken Western states.

But much of the milk was diverted into the market, where it pulled down the market price of milk that the government had been trying to bolster.

That Post story was one of several it published in recent weeks about the widespread madness in the way the government spent $25 billion in farm aid last year alone. The series detailed many millions of dollars spent in disaster relief for ranchers who happened to be somewhere near where the space shuttle Columbia fell to Earth, in the same state that suffered earthquake damage or in a county that had suffered a moderate drought two years before.

The political pressure to continue with these absurd programs only takes its cover from the demands of, and the concern for, family farmers. The existing system serves to drive the small farmers off the land, bought out by larger operators who have been luckier or more skillful at farming the government.

It's time to plow under this theory of farm assistance.