Government Handouts and the Homestead Act

Free land built a powerful American myth, but it also left a trail of failed farms, broken plans, and hard lessons that still matter today. We start with the Homestead Act and use it as a mirror for modern agriculture, asking a question that gets uncomfortable fast: when the government “helps” farmers through grants, loans, and farm subsidies, does it strengthen real farm viability or does it quietly make farmers more dependent and less free?

We work through a biblical perspective on government and farming, including why taxation is not the same thing as redistribution, and why Christian generosity depends on private property and willing hearts. Then we get practical: how subsidy programs can distort market signals, nudge farm decisions toward the ideology of whoever controls the purse strings, and accelerate growth so fast that the school of hard knocks becomes fatal instead of educational. If you care about regenerative agriculture, small family farms, or farm business sustainability, you’ll recognize the tension between doing what’s permissible and doing what’s beneficial.

We also dig into the unintended consequences of westward expansion incentives, including how “free” land removed a key economic warning sign and how railroad incentives shaped settlement patterns and shipping costs. The thread that ties it all together is a heart question: when farming gets hard, are we planning from trust in God’s provision or from a belief that government must fix our problems?

Subscribe for more conversations on faith, farming, and policy, and if this challenged you, share it with a farmer or food-lover and leave a review. What do you think actually helps farmers thrive long term?

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The Homestead Act Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Homestead Act. 1862, the government opens the West. Any citizen willing to go out, live on 160 acres, and improve it for five years gets the deed. Free land, millions of acres, the original story of the American family farm. Government clearing away ordinary people building something out of nothing. Um sounds like a success. Or was it? Was it actually helpful to people? Was the government giving free stuff, free land to citizens to settle the West actually helpful? Is the government giving free things to farmers a way to help them or not? That's what we want to talk about on this week's edition of the Redeeming the Dirt Podcast. I'm Noah Sanders and glad to have you this week. Today we're going to be continuing our series on faith, farming, and government, and talking a little bit about the biblical relationship of government to farming and agriculture. I want to talk a little bit today about kind of one of the ways that farmers are attempted to be helped by the government, which is through money, through giving them money, giving them access to grants, giving them access to loans, giving them access to subsidies, and whether that actually helps or it hurts. So, first of all, you know, we see in the scriptures that taxation, where the government is receiving money, we have to give money to the government through the taxes that we pay, is a very biblical thing. Jesus himself paid taxes. It's very clear, like we saw in Romans 13, that if you owe taxes, pay taxes. So, but that's not what we're gonna, that's not the main thing that we're talking about when we talk about the relationship of government and farming. A farming grant is not funding the operations of the government. It is wealth distribution, redistribution. Wealth moved from one person in the community to another person. Um normally the way that people are helped in

Faith Farming And Government Framework

SPEAKER_00 1:58

uh communities where there's not welfare is through voluntary charity. That's historically in the US how people were helped. And uh I'm a farmer and I have the ability to get uh funds, especially as a regenerative farmer, um, through different programs and those kind of things as a uh as a farmer. And the question that I have to ask as a Christian is, you know, is that something that God would be okay with? Uh is it something that he would allow? Um, is it something that's normal? Um now when we look at the normal roles of government, I would say that it is not something that we typically see where this redistribution of wealth is really a forced uh generosity, a forced charity of helping somebody uh with money taken forcibly from somebody else. And if uh I was been listening in 2 Corinthians recently, is Paul's taking a contribution to the church of people in uh Jerusalem that needed help. And he talked very clearly that this gift that was to be given, the way that we help each other where there is supposed to be some equality, is not through uh involuntary giving, but it's something that should come from the heart. And when you when you deviate from that and you say, no, you shouldn't, this shouldn't belong to you, it should belong to that person over there, then it really violates the principle of generosity because generosity presupposes private property. You cannot give away that which you uh don't own. And so once we kind of uh this this once we sh drift into this welfare state, kind of these ideas of socialism, it really takes the responsibility of generosity away from the individual and the accountability that goes along with that for the recipient. And it's the government then who is uh taking the responsibility of that. And unfortunately, it can be used as a way to manipulate people through um, you know, handouts and the dependency that breeds. Now we have to show some grace um to make sure we don't go beyond what the scripture says is allowed. Uh we have an interesting example in you know Ezra, which was uh another book I was reading through recently in the Old Testament, where a lot of the temple that was rebuilt after the people of Israel came back from exile in Babylon, it was actually the decree of um the ruler who told them to use the funds from the royal treasury to rebuild the temple. And so God can do whatever he wants to do. If he wants to rebuild his temple with the treasury of the pagan government, you know, he totally can do that. Uh but as we're thinking about what the normal pattern is, it wasn't the normal pattern throughout scripture and throughout God's people to say, why don't you go and uh use money from the government to help people? It was much more helping people voluntarily through generosity and helping the poor. You know, and if we read about in 1 Corinthians, I think it's it's uh helpful to understand or guard against the idea of always looking for well, what's allowed? What's allowed? You know, what's I think we could do that. I think we could take money from the government, that should be allowed. Um, we need it. Well, in 1 Corinthians, we have this challenge

Forced Charity Versus Generosity

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that Paul gives to them where he says, well, you know, everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. So really it's a low bar to be asking, well, does God allow it? We want to be asking, is it actually beneficial? And as we think about this idea of um receiving help and as farmers from monies taken from the government through grants or subsidies, subsidies or whatever, um, you know, it may be allowed, it may be sometimes be, you know, we think necessary, especially with the uh the economics today where subsidies of farm crops sometimes make it where you just can't make a profit if you don't take the subsidies. But I think it is helpful to consider some of the um ways that taking handouts basically from the government uh may not always be beneficial. You know, first of all, there's this dependency. You know, once you're receiving money from the government or from anybody in order to succeed as a farmer uh or in anything, then it's easy to develop a dependency. Um, a lot of times there's good intentions on, we just want to get you started or help you to survive so that you don't need this anymore. But unfortunately, a lot of times it just becomes a recurring thing year after year. And the challenge with that becomes that if we as farmers want to do something that's you know different or creative or innovative, or we disagree in philosophy in the way that the government uh approaches farming um ethically as with production models or those kind of things, then we aren't really free to disagree because you know we're receiving that handout and we have to uh make sure we don't bite the hand that feeds us. Now, of course, as Christians, we should do the right thing regardless, but there is a uh limitation of freedom when we are in a dependent state. You're not as free to make decisions about expressing and living out your worldview uh when you are kind of relying on someone else, whether you're in debt or you're receiving handouts. You know, another thing that's challenging about uh receiving money from the government as a farmer is that it can send, especially if you're trying to uh make money, you know, as a with a business, it can just send distorted signals. Because if you're gonna have a successful business, you need to be paying attention to, you know, what the market is demanding, uh, what value people are looking for. Is there are there people that are gonna pay for what you grow? Because you can completely succeed as a farmer in terms of growing a nice crop of corn. But if nobody in the community or where you could market it to wants corn, then you've succeeded you've succeeded as a farmer and failed as a businessman, and you're gonna go out of business as a farmer. The challenge with receiving grants, and I've seen this with different programs that I've worked with where there's a lot of grants involved, is the actions and the development of your farm, the running of your farm, or your program, even if you're doing farm training or something like that, ends up being catered to the um where the money is, where the money's coming from, making sure that you're meeting certain um qualifications of that are being looked for in the people that are handing out that money. And it may um sometimes mean that you grow in certain ways or you make certain business decisions about infrastructure or things that you're going to do that you might not have done otherwise, um, particularly in the in terms of grants, is uh your the signaling of thinking about how you make these decisions about what you purchase or or don't purchase is less clear what your business or your customer base actually needs or demands or wants. And it's more about what you can get for quote free. And then the challenge uh, you know, as well is that a lot of times the um there is always an ideology behind grants. You know, we're trying to promote this and promote that. And they can be good things that we're promoting, you know, land conservation or new farmers or whatever. But at the end of the day, uh, instead of our farms being primarily driven by what serves the people in our community, what serves the people that we're growing food for, instead, it is uh you are making decisions to do certain things in farming that is in line with the ideology of the people controlling the purse strings, even if they're good ideologies, instead of the actual accountability of real life farming in the real world. And, you know, that's true even today with people trying to get farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture. It, you know, you hand money, say, hey, here's some money for you to be able to make the transition, um, and that's great. But it is uh real, true, successful, profitable farming uh shouldn't just be

Dependency And Losing Freedom

SPEAKER_00 10:44

only a good decision that you make or something that you make just because um of oh it you can get money for it. Um, but it should be something that you believe in personally as an ideology. Um and that there isn't, you know, it's just a danger of manipulating agriculture to places that could potentially be not where you want to end up because you're not being held accountable to what makes a profit. You have money to dole out based on your ideology. And that can pronounce you know dangerous acceleration. I've always talked about the idea to some of my farm classes of start small and lose small. You know, if you borrowed money to raise a thousand chickens when you had never raised chickens before, and you have to learn the lesson of the fact, you know, a product a production lesson, for instance, where you lose half the chickens. Well, that's expensive. You lost 500 chickens. Or let's say you learned a marketing lesson where, you know, the way that you raised them, you weren't able to market them in your area, or there was a regulation you didn't understand, or um, there was just not a demand like you thought, uh, it's very hard, you know, it'd be very expensive if you had invested in a thousand chickens, that's thousands of dollars that you've invested in production. But if you'd started with a hundred, you know, to lose 50 out of 100, if you're gonna lose half the chickens, uh, is a lot cheaper lesson. And you can make adjustments as you grow and you build. And, you know, government money, again, kind of works like debt. It gives you, it kind of pushes you down the road of hard knock so fast that wrecks can be fatal instead of just a lesson along the way. On your own resources, you know, you you tend to go at a slower speed, and if you crash, you can get up and keep going. And that is something that you add to your um lessons of experience of don't do this because one time, you know, I did that. And then another challenge is that uh, and this has been something particularly for me over the years that I feel just personally accountable for is when I say that I'm a Christian farmer and I'm trying to show that you can actually make it as a farmer, as a small-scale family farmer, you know, totally fine with with, you know, if some people feel led to take money for grants and those kind of things to overcome the hurdles of getting started, you know, there we have to be faithful with what we have. But um, there is a challenge where I say, okay, well, if I say, I succeeded as a farmer, I have proven that you can make a living farming and that you can, you know, thrive and succeed. But that was dependent on unique special handouts from the government, then it's kind of, you know, there's a risk that there's not as much of a testimony of God that brings glory to God. Um, and it can be more pointing to relying on and trusting in and demanding that the government fix our problems, which really kind of makes the government God. Again, like the example of Ezra, there are times if God chooses to use pagan funds uh to build his temple, he can do that. So I don't want to um make that, you know, something something say beyond what the scripture says, but at the same time, that is not a common pattern throughout scripture that uh that we're told to follow. It was uh an extreme situation. And uh again, sometimes we're in extreme situations as farmers. But I think it's helpful to I want to talk about this idea, um, this story historically of a government intervention in agriculture that uh we're probably all familiar with and probably have good um perspectives on for the most part. I know I did growing up, and that is the Homestead Act, which is which is where in the late 1800s the US government made land out west free for people who would claim it and settle on a homestead and allowed and it created a big settlement

When Grants Distort Farm Decisions

SPEAKER_00 14:48

rush where a lot of people went and settled through the Homestead Act and were able to make claims on land and get uh settle on a homestead and start farming. If you're we've read the Little House on the Prairie books, you know, we're familiar with how they went and homesteaded. And yeah, there's a book that I have uh that I've read um over the years that is really helpful and opened my eyes on this topic, and it's called The War on the Poor by uh historian and economist Clarence B. Carson, and he talks about um some of the unforeseen impacts of giving free land away to farmers and the the ultimate suffering that that actually produced and the twisted way in which it caused the land out west to be settled. Now it's a blessing that the land got settled. There's many families there that are live out west whose roots are in homesteading, and I'm not saying that there aren't good things that came from that, but if you think about typical settlement, typical farming, you know, um as farmers and settlers would move to an area, uh a lot of times settlement would be driven by water availability, where the best soil is, where the resources are, you know, where there's accessibility to transportation like rivers, access to markets. Um but with the Homestead Act, instead of there being a real demand for farmers or really good food or really good land that they could settle in areas that they all wanted to go and be in particular areas, there was the primary motivation, even though there were some of those things, um, some of the primary motivation was free. You know, you could get land for free. And land is not normally free. In farming, you know, if there's a real economic demand for something, there's enough of a demand, you should be able to pay for the land, typically in most situations, um if the actual long-term viability of farming in that region is practical. Um and when you remove that price tag from the land, it kind of removes one of the informing factors of whether or not the farm will be successful in the long term. And so what that did is that people came just for free land. They settled broadly and thinly across the prairie. I mean, normally you think about New England and other places, they would settle kind of in um communities, villages, start towns, and kind of branch out and were clustered around what was the what made the best sense as far as access to resources. And you didn't have um, except you know, self-sufficient pioneers necessarily didn't have people just going way out in the middle of nowhere and starting a farm profitably because eventually, you know, that you're not gonna be able to sell anything if you're actually developing that country um for you know long term and not just living as a self-sufficient um hermit family in a sense. And the result was that enormous amounts of homesteads and farms failed later. We went to the Dakotas uh a couple years ago and actually went to an actual homestead, still had the dugout there, uh, still saw where the equipment was and everything. And you could see dugouts in different places all over the countryside there. And basically, almost all of the original homesteaders there left because they didn't make it. They had been incentivized to go there for free land, and the result was that there was a mass migration back out of the country not that long after it was settled. And it's kind of it refers back to what we were talking about in the last episode where you had these different layers of jurisdiction kind of that God has established, where there's the family, then there's the church, and then there's the government in terms of cultivating character in people, but also there's just the economics. And normally, if a farming family is going to have to decide whether or not they moved and immigrated and started a new farm, they would have to factor in. Can we afford the land? Where will we sell our stuff? Uh, do we have enough money to do it to get started for the first several years? Um, and there's a bunch of different factors. But when you have your primary motivation being, oh, it's free, it's free land, then you kind of say, well, it doesn't matter, all those things, I'll just figure it out. It's just free, let's just go. And, you know, millions of acres did get settled. Plenty of families did make it. They built real farms in the good areas uh and their descendants, many of them still farm today. But uh, and I'm not saying nothing good came of it, but the challenge is that there were a lot of things that were not factored in. And a lot of the poor, unfortunately, who were meant to be helped by it, uh were hurt by the kind of offer to go into farming when it ended up not being profitable at the end of the day. And part of the challenge, too, was there was free land given to railroads, which sounds great, but they were paid per mile uh by the government and given a certain amount of land on either side of the railroad that they gave away to settlers or sold for very cheap. And instead of the railroads having to think, can we afford to lay this track? Is there going to be enough uh produced and shipped in this region for us to justify building it and the rates that we're gonna charge? Or even thinking, you know, where should we take the railroad track? You know, normally you'd say, I think there might be a good town site here, so we'll go there and and try to follow the resources and where people are likely to ship stuff from. But when you're just being paid per mile, uh you're gonna pick the straightest, flattest route, regardless of where it goes. And that ended up being some of the way that it was built. You get paid for miles and you say you build miles. And then they uh sold a lot of the land around the railroads to lure people out there. And towns, and a lot of them, you know, a lot of towns were built and settled around railroads. Uh, but then the challenge was that because uh eventually the railroads had to face the economics of such distances, the rates were almost three times as much west of the Mississippi as they were east of the Mississippi. Um, you know, to ship corn from central Nebraska to Omaha, which is about 150 miles, cost more than shipping it from Omaha to Chicago, which is over twice the distance. Um

Homesteading Railroads And Unintended Harm

SPEAKER_00 21:48

so I think just understanding that in trying to help farmers and trying to help um economically incentivize certain things through free money, through free land, through free resources. uh we have to be careful because sometimes the decisions and the way the decisions that we make as families to do certain things uh with our farms that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise uh could not always be the best long-term decision. Uh just to kind of put a little bit of this in Clarence B. Carson's words that he says it better than I do, I'm gonna read just a small section from his book here. This chapter, Farmers at Bay. There is, it should be clear, a close relation between government policy and the deteriorating farm situation. This book was written in 1969. It should be obvious that free land contributed to the great increase in production that in turn led to lower prices. The cost of land is one of the deterrents to going into farming. Farming can be made to look most attractive if this cost is removed or reduced to a minimum. A prime economic consideration is removed from the initial decision to go into farming. The effect of this was for many to be lured into farming for whom it was not an economic pursuit or who would make farming uneconomic for those already in it. Those who suffered most from this would be the poor. In the first place, the production of those who received free or inexpensive land, which led to a decline in prices made many new marginal farmers. Of the older established farmers in the East, those with the smallest holdings, the poorest soil and the least effective equipment in a word the poor became the marginal or submarginal farmers. Many of those who settled in the West quickly became marginal farmers themselves. One writer indicates their plight, quote, because of the steady decline of the price level, farmers in newer settled regions were usually worse off than those in older areas since they had to borrow money to get started and were therefore burdened with fixed interest charges that became harder and harder to meet with each passing year. In the 1890s, thousands lost their farms and returned eastward penniless and dispirited one other point about the government's free homestead policy needs to be made a vigorous and profitable cattle industry had developed on the Great Plains in the late 1860s and the 1870s. These cattle had been grazed on the open range. The coming of homesteaders disrupted this development for homesteaders tried to farm their small holdings, throw up fences and sundered one part of the ranch from another. Many of these farmers did not succeed on their plots of land in arid country, but they did denude the land of its covering and prevent what was probably the most economic use of the land, which was cattle production on the prairies and ultimately we ended up having the Dust Bowl. So one thing that's sobering to think is that these handouts from the government you know these examples of the Homestead Act luring farmers out west, again many of them succeeding, but many, many of them not, it was not something that was forced. It was favor given from the government and sometimes they think oh well it'd be really negative if the government forced us to do something but sometimes there's more danger when we ourselves are caused to make decisions because of favor that comes from the government that can still lead to our destruction in making bad decisions at the end of the day. Next time we talk a little bit about specifically regulations and how those kind of impact farming but I just wanted us to think a little bit today about this idea of handouts, money, and what the Bible kind of says that we should think about that as Christians and also these examples historically in the U.S. of things that we typically think of as positives from our history like the Homestead Act, or giving railroads free land to make connections out west, uh, actually having some negative or a lot of negative consequences, especially for poor for the poor who were looking to get started farming in ways that I hadn't really thought about in the past. So as we as Christians are thinking about ways that the government can help farmers, I would not be one to promote favor, especially through handouts or grants or anything, being something that in the long term is a really helpful, beneficial thing. It ends up creating again the risk of dependency, the risk of decisions that are made on factors that aren't necessarily, you know, realistic decisions made driven by ideology over what actually will serve our community and again the dangerous acceleration that can be made in the growth of our farms or businesses, just like debt can give us where the school of hard knocks can be fatal instead of educational. And again, at the end of the day I think the thing that we really should be questioning ourselves and checking our own hearts is whether or not the decisions we're making and how we're making

Permissible Versus Beneficial Closing

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them when we face challenges as farmers, whether they reflect ultimately a trust in God or a trust in the government to fix our problems. Sometimes that means humbling ourselves and being willing to let God use the government to help us, even in a really weird situation like with Ezra in the temple and the funds from Babylon. But so we don't want to put God in a box. But the real thing that God's after is our heart and whether or not we're ultimately looking to him to provide for us. You know, we don't want to just be asking what is permissible, but what is beneficial. As we're uh listening to conversations about how the government should or should not help farmers, I think that's a helpful thing to think about and remember that handouts to farmers historically has not typically been helpful to them in general. So you may have some completely different ideas about this and that's great. I love discussion if you go to the show notes there's a link where you can send me a message and I love to hear from you. And until next time I encourage you to be faithful to be humble and to keep redeeming the dirt. God bless