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There is intense concentration within the industrial agriculture 'toolchain'. John Deere, CNH Industrial and AGCO, the next largest competitors, sell 75-85%+ of
by arbitrary_name 5y ago
There is intense concentration within the industrial agriculture 'toolchain'. John Deere, CNH Industrial and AGCO, the next largest competitors, sell 75-85%+ of combine harvesters in the US. Plus, there are things like tie-ins with Bayer/Monsantos data science platforms that smaller vendors can't or don't offer.
Tom Philpott describes this really well in 'Perilous Bounty': there are lots of farmers who are price takers. Their only way forward is to hope to survive weather and price cycles by producing more, more efficiently. This ironically leads to overproduction and poor returns.
Whereas JD are price makers who can use their consolidated power to set terms and prices within the market. Farmers don't really stand a chance.
- daniel-cussen 5y agoFunny I was reading a book about US-North Korea relations wherein they talk about the effect of trade sanctions on North Korea. They didn't work, basically, and one reason why was because Korean agriculture was not very mechanized, so lack of imports of parts didn't really matter.