Farmer's Bailouts worse than Bank's bailouts? And... real estate?

[Chris Martin]

Numbers wise, the answer (today) to the farm bailout exceeding the bank bailout is clearly 'yes.'  Banks borrowed, as is TOTAL DISBURSEMENTS, $632 billion after the great recession (primarily 2008-2010) and paid back $739 billion. That's a net $107 billion POSITIVE to date. All this is old news. And FNMA actually adds many tens of billions in the form of US tax payer equity on top of that. Fannie Mae has about $15 billion in market capitalization. The US Treasury owns 79.9% that could be sold and the cash returned to the US Treasury. In hindsight, having lived through the collapse, I'd say we (the US) dodged a potentially lethal bullet. 

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list

The current Farm bailouts are just unfolding, with last year's $12 billion bailout and today's \announced $15 billion additional bailout that are reimbursing farmers who were harmed financially by the administration trade policies. Put bluntly, the administration impaired free market trade from US soybean farmers, primarily, as exports to China dropped by 95%+ in 2018. What about the impact on real estate? Rural farmers are in distress in my area. From hurricanes to trade policies, the last few years have been difficult... and land values remain depressed. I own land in counties declared disaster areas and the latest trade policies seem to add to the distress. Midwest soybean farm land, I would guess, will (or has) been impacted but I don't know this for fact. Sure. Switch crops. But how do you know next year's trade policy won't hammer corn? A few years ago it was NC tobacco... 

I've been a buyer in distressed markets before, so personally maybe there is a silver lining. 

Disclaimer: I own land in rural NC zoned agriculture