Help from the Feds

"Juan George gets worked up about the U.S. farm bill.

He bristled that Congress provides disproportionately large benefits to growers in the Midwest and the South while ignoring small organic farms in New Jersey like the one he's been running since the mid-1990s with his wife, Susan Keymer.

While Merrick Farm has received a hefty chunk of taxpayer dollars -- $600,000 -- to preserve the 60-acre property as farmland in perpetuity, Keymer said she had to pay virtually all of that to Uncle Sam a few years ago as taxes after she inherited the farm from her aunt.

Congress -- backed by the New Jersey congressional delegation --- is considering retooling the farm bill this year to boost organic agriculture and help small- and medium-sized growers in New Jersey and other states outside the nation's agricultural belt.

George said such an overhaul is overdue because organic and conventional local farmers -- those who use chemicals on their crops -- are getting squeezed all over New Jersey."

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