ABSTRACT
U.S. agricultural policy affects many important outcomes of the food system, including the well-being of farmers and farmworkers, environmental quality, the price of food in supermarkets and restaurants, and the nutritional quality of American diets. Yet this topic is widely misunderstood, in part because farm subsidy programs are complex and more heterogeneous than most people realize. The objective of this chapter is to make agricultural policy more comprehensible to outsiders, especially readers whose curiosity about the farm sector originates from public interest goals.
