Biden’s Pick for Agriculture is a Safe, Solid Choice. But U.S. Farm Policy Needs Fresh Thinking.

PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE BIDEN sent a risk-averse signal by choosing Tom Vilsack as his nominee for secretary of agriculture. Mr. Vilsack is a 70-year-old former Democratic governor of Iowa and has already done an eight-year stint as head of the Agriculture Department under President Barack Obama. Eminently experienced, qualified and confirmable, even if Republicans control the Senate, Mr. Vilsack would transition smoothly into a task that figures to involve mainly the drafting of a new five-year farm bill due in 2023.

But what if federal farm policy needs not caution and continuity but a shake-up? A rough summary of current policy would be: subsidize established producers of the traditional American diet, based on dairy, meat and sugar. (Also, cotton.) Yet consumers, who are also taxpayers, seem increasingly skeptical of these products’ nutritional benefits, at least relative to their costs in terms of obesity and other health issues. Agricultural production is a source of carbon emissions and other environmental harms. What’s more, federal farm subsidies are a non-trivial, but neglected, factor in economic inequality. To be sure, the nutritional aid that forms the bulk of the USDA’s annual budget — $117 billion out of a $140 billion total in fiscal 2019 — helps the poor. But production subsidies, which dominate the rest of the budget, disproportionately favor well-to-do farmers and agribusiness. The 2018 farm bill actually exacerbated this by making more-distant relatives — such as cousins, nephews and nieces — eligible to share in “family farm” subsidies, even if their participation isminimal.

The ostensible goal of farm policy, food security, has long since been achieved: Not even a global pandemic caused significant shortages, even if individual families did often struggle to afford what was available due to job losses or other economic hardship. Farms in the United States are so productive that exports are now a major source of their income — though President Trump’s tariff war with China certainly put a crimp in sales to that country. Mr. Trump channeled $28 billion in offsetting aid to farmers; as of mid-2019, 70 percent of the money had gone to just 100,000 individuals, according to an NPR analysis. Buoyed by federal aid, both for the trade war and $5 billion related to coronavirus (a fifth of which went to just 1 percent of recipients, according to the Environmental Working Group), net farm income is set to reach $120 billion in fiscal 2020.