NRCS GRANTS
Suddenly I’m getting requests about whether or not to get an NRCS grant for farm development infrastructure. Yesterday a lady emailed me in a quandary because she pursued one of these grants for a hoophouse and now she’s embroiled in a zoning and building permitting problem with her local regulators.
Entering the bureaucracy malaise normally doesn’t end well. I know I’ll get negative feedback on this post, but let me explain my reasons to stay away from ALL government offices.
1. The bureaucrats overengineer everything so the costs consume the grant. You’ll be financially better off creatively doing it your way than letting a government agent with no skin in the game tell you what you need. We lease a farm that many years ago went into a water development program with NRCS cost-share. After several dry wells and a failed Rube Goldberg set-up in a seep and $100,000 later (the landowner’s share) the whole system failed in the first year and the farmer had to haul water to his cows. This was for 120 acres.
We came in and spent $15,000 building a pond and putting in water line to service 400 acres (more than triple the NRCS project) and have run as many as 720 head of cattle over there at one time for a decade without failure. Always plenty of water. The NRCS hates ponds; they’re considered a liability. Tell that to the beavers.
2. The time and energy you spend filling out paperwork would be far better invested just going ahead with your project. Grants appeal to people who love paperwork. Most successful farmers are git-er-done kind of people who don’t relish sitting at the desk all day talking with bureaucrats.
3. The rules are rigid. I build crooked fences to follow the terrain. Not the NRCS—it’s all straight fences, hang the terrain. That creates all sorts of erosion and animal movement issues. I like all portable water systems; NRCS hates them. They want concrete and stationary watering points, which create high impact zones, pathogen incubation spots, and pollutes the groundwater with excess manure and urine accumulating in one place.
4. It can land you in additional regulatory dilemmas. Like the lady who emailed me yesterday who now has local zoning and building permit bureaucrats crawling over her land telling her she can’t build a hoop house, when you seek government help they kindly add your name to every other regulatory roster they can imagine. Better to do a don’t ask, don’t tell program than voluntarily place your head on the chopping block.
5. The money was stolen from somebody to give to you. One of the most fundamental principles in libertarianism and voluntaryism is that you can’t offer charity obtained in thievery. In other words, a charity that runs on burgled cash is not a good thing, regardless of how noble and kind the charity may be. If you don’t think violence took that money, try not paying your taxes. It was taken from somebody at the end of a gun. I don’t participate in those kinds of extortive games. Remember Davy Crockett telling the widowed soldier’s wife who appealed to him for government money: “Ma’am, I’d love to help you, but it’s not my money.” The government has no money it doesn’t first take from someone else.
Government grants are a perfect example of the cure being worse than the disease. Sure, somebody wills say “the grant got me over a hump.” This assumes there was no other way, and I dare to suggest there’s always a better way than government handouts. You can’t assume that just because something had a personal positive outcome for you, the overall societal benefit is good.
What’s your “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you” story?