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“For a country that prides itself on the notion of the family farmer, the United States too often takes family farmers for granted.”
I was eight years old, walking with my grandfather through the cornfields on our family’s farm outside of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The crop was in terrible shape; no rain for months had left most of it considerably stunted, with no hope of recovering.
At that time, in the late 1980s, my dad had been talking about taking over the farm. The drought made him reconsider those plans. If the farm could not grow enough feed for its cows, it would have to be purchased on the open market, at inflated prices. And that was pushing the whole operation into debt. I remember his silence at dinnertime. I remember him pacing up and down the driveway at night.
Why would anyone go into a line of work where you regularly spend more than you earn? Where, after working twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-hour days, you struggle just to pay the lighting bill or buy groceries? My dad decided against taking over the family farm. My grandfather eventually retired, but only after an aunt willed her house to our family to settle debts. The farm remains in the family to this day.
Most farmers are not so lucky; their farming careers end in foreclosure, or, in the worst cases, suicide. As droughts and floods grow worse while prices stagnate, thousands of farmers are either quitting or being driven out.
Rural America is in crisis and our food system needs reform. The question is whether our politicians have the courage and creativity to make the changes we need. Specifically, we must do three things: strive to ensure that markets are competitive, reform how commodities are priced, and make a principled transition to more sustainable ways of growing food.
If we seriously work on these initiatives, rural America has a prosperous future. If we continue to neglect them, the problems we already face will only get worse.
We need to keep the small-scale and medium-size farms that still exist, while creating paths for more family farms to emerge in the future. The reason is that these farms buy and sell local. Farm families have children who attend local schools. Small-scale farmers care more for their land and livestock than factory-style operations with outside investors and overworked, exploited workforces.
Most farmers are not so lucky; their farming careers end in foreclosure, or, in the worst cases, suicide.
Our food system exists in a state of extreme concentration. According to a March 2019 report by the Open Markets Institute, the four largest poultry processing firms went from controlling 35 percent of the total market in 1986 to 51 percent in 2015. In the beef industry, the market share of the top four companies jumped from 25 percent in 1977 to 85 percent in 2015. And the top four corn seed companies’ market share grew from 59 percent to 85 percent during that same period.
The supermarket chains where you get your hamburgers, chicken, and potato chips are also getting fewer and more powerful. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the share of sales for the four principal grocery outlets rose from 16 percent in 1992 to just under 45 percent in 2016.
While Tyson and JBS control the meat industry, Walmart and Costco dominate retail.
But bigger is not better. The monopolization of the food industry puts added pressures on farmers, raising prices for such inputs as seeds and machinery. And because of the decline in competition, consumers pay more at the cash register.
What can be done to challenge these food monopolies? First, politicians must begin to enforce our country’s antitrust laws, namely, the Progressive Era Sherman, Clayton, and Federal Trade Commission Acts. These laws can be used to penalize corporations that unfairly limit competition by fixing prices, colluding to control supply, or engaging in mergers that make markets thin.
Up until the Reagan Administration, antitrust laws were commonly used to keep markets competitive, in agriculture and other areas of the economy. The concentrated markets that have resulted from governmental neglect allow corporations to turn farmers from price-setters into price-takers.
Still, even if agribusiness giants are broken up, there remains the issue of how prices for commodities are set. In 2010, the USDA and the Department of Justice hosted a series of public workshops on pricing, regulations, and competition. Farmers who attended the workshops in Iowa, Colorado, Alabama, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., testified about cartel behavior by food processors and opaque pricing formulas that only agribusiness elites understand.
Another issue affecting local farmers is international trade. Just ask Wisconsin dairy farmers, who saw milk prices tumble and their debts rise after China cut its purchase of milk powder in 2014. And President Donald Trump’s foolish trade wars have made the situation even worse. In 2018 and 2019, due to a combination of decreased demand and retaliatory tariffs from China and Mexico, Wisconsin led the nation in farm bankruptcies.
Meanwhile, the newly revised NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada, known as USMCA, stands to serve corporate agribusiness exporters more than family farmers. Free trade, especially since the original NAFTA went into effect in 1994, has gutted rural economies by driving down farm incomes instead of improving them.
While farm incomes saw a marginal improvement in 2019 when compared to 2018, farm incomes have been stagnant for years. Farmers are also getting older and more of them are retiring. In the most recent five-year Agricultural Census, in 2017, the average age of U.S. farmers was 57.5, up from 56.3 in 2012. And as farmers get too old to continue, family members are not taking over the operations.
To put it bluntly: Young people don’t see farming as a real career, in part because it pays so poorly.
If the family farm has a future in America, policymakers must reform pricing, which means bringing back parity. Parity is the notion, central to New Deal agriculture policy, that the incomes of farmers ought to be on par with those of workers in cities. During the Great Depression, parity policies were implemented to keep rural economies viable, instead of driving migration to overcrowded, impoverished urban areas.
This is not about giving taxpayer-funded bailouts to farmers. The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) was set up to serve farmers and consumers by buying products off the market to raise farm incomes, then distributing what was purchased to schools and soup kitchens. While the CCC still exists, it could have a bigger role in the farm economy, helping improve farm incomes and provide quality food to folks in cities.
Parity was once central to agricultural policy, but over the years has been steadily dismantled. Farmers now tend to fend for themselves. There are cooperatives, but many farmers have become involved in the same merger frenzy and corrupt side deals as agribusiness corporations.
To put it bluntly: Young people don’t see farming as a real career, in part because it pays so poorly.
Cooperatives should work for their members by promoting democratic participation and fair prices. What sets cooperatives apart from corporations are different priorities, including a concern with community well-being over profits, as stated in the Rochdale Principles. Instead, decisions in many agribusiness cooperatives are made by nonfarmer representatives who help consolidate already concentrated markets.
The result is that farmers are left with no other option than to ramp up production. Individually, this may seem like a good idea but, collectively, uncoordinated production floods markets and drives prices down for everyone.
Bringing back parity pricing would allow farmers to plant less and perhaps give some of their land a rest or put it to other uses, like renting it to an enterprising farmer interested in sustainable production.
Overproduction also creates serious problems for the environment. The Farm Bill rewards environmentally friendly practices, yet such programs are voluntary and resources for conservation are minimal. Given that agriculture accounts for nearly 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, we need to offer incentives for farmers to localize production and sequester carbon.
Real incentives are also needed for farmers to practice sustainable agriculture, or what some may call agroecology, which tends to be labor- and time-intensive. The National Young Farmers Coalition, as well as the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota and the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association in California, have programs to help people begin careers in sustainable farming, but such initiatives remain localized and are woefully underfunded. Efforts to create the next generation of small-scale farmers must be expanded.
And any effort to reform farm policy must include migrant farmworkers. According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, three-fourths of the nation’s nearly three million farmworkers have lived in the United States for at least ten years and, on average, had stayed with their current employer for at least seven years, carrying with them a wealth of food system knowledge. These essential workers must be provided with a pathway to citizenship; one vehicle for doing so would be the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019, which passed the House of Representatives in December with bipartisan support.
For a country that prides itself on the notion of the family farmer, the United States too often takes family farmers themselves for granted. And instead of cultivating the next generation of farmers, our politicians offer little hope for anyone wanting to get involved in growing food.
I often think about my family’s farm and those drought years. There’s something dreadful about watching your crops die. You wait for rain. You pray for it. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t. In those hard times, you must ask for help. You ask the Lord, your friends, and your family. There comes a time when you may ask your government. And too often, it is just not listening.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take better care of the land, our food, and each other. What we need is courageous, creative politicians willing to take on corporate power and support rural communities so that they can grow, and not dry up and wither away.