April 14, 2009 5:06PM # Feds Pay Farmers to Till the Desert By [Tad DeHaven](https://www.cato.org/people/tad-dehaven) --- SHARE No, [this headline and story](http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D97IEQT00&show_article=1) is not brought to you by *The Onion*. The latest proof that there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary federal program: > As drought forces families in the West to shorten their showers and let their lawns turn brown, two Depression-era government programs have been paying some of the nation’s biggest farms hundreds of millions of dollars to grow water-thirsty crops in what was once desert. My sympathy for this farmer lies somewhere between that which I have for Bernie Madoff and Ted Stevens: > Jim Hansen, a 69-year-old cotton grower in California’s Central Valley, said his family business would crumble if the government took away low-cost water and the nearly $1.7 million in crop payments he received in 2007 and 2008. For more on the insanity that is federal farm policy and why the USDA needs to be downsized and/​or done away with, click [here](http://downsizing.cato.org/agriculture). ##### Related Tags [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy), [Department of Agriculture](https://www.cato.org/department-agriculture), [Downsizing Government](https://www.cato.org/downsizing-government) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).