By DAVID MERCER
Associated Press Writer
NEW MADRID, Mo. – The white puff of cotton blooms cover Missouri’s Bootheel at harvest, filling both tiny planter boxes outside a Super 8 motel’s front door and nearby thousand-acre spreads. “Thank goodness they’re able to do it,” a radio deejay reminds listeners as farmers take their crop to the gin.
They can, thanks to millions in federal farm subsidies – payments critics say merely funnel money from taxpayers to already wealthy growers. But farmers and agricultural economists argue the subsides have cushioned cotton country – even in the Mississippi Delta, where poverty is a constant – against the ravages the recession.
“Those programs provided that stability out here that other parts of the country might not have experienced,” said Darren Hudson, an economist and director of the Cotton Economics Research Institute at Texas Tech University. “That stability provided by the programs helped buffer the region, helped buffer agriculture, which helped soften the blow to the overall region.”