8 ms·

Three farmers on monopolies and mismanagement in U.S. agriculture

174 points by strict9 1y ago

DaveZale 1y ago
farming is hard. around here, cities will buy up farms just for the water rights, so the land prices are so high, nobody sane would go into that business. forget all the high tech AI laser weeding machines. those might add an edge to large, already successful operations. Getting started or renewing a failed operation is a 24 hour per day job. Sure, it's a crisis
- zdragnar 1y ago
  Generations of family farms have been selling out over the course of my life due to the bad economics. Dairy farms consolidate, and fields are worth more for building houses on than for growing corn or soy or wheat. It used to be at least one of the kids would take over the farm, but now as parents age out, there's simply too many better opportunities with less hard effort out there and fewer are interested in staying in the business.
  - duxup 1y ago
    I think there's a good argument that farming has always been difficult and the ideal of the quaint family farm was really not very pleasant in reality much of the time. A local university ran some numbers a while back and noted that the early farmstead plots in the US were not large enough to support a farm for long, even at that time.
- larsiusprime 1y ago
  Indeed. One of the chief causes of high land prices for farmland is unmet demand for housing in the urban core, so farm and ranch land gets bid up to development prices. A lot of advocates of building restrictions did it in the name of preserving nature/farmland/greenspace, but in many ways it’s had the opposite effect: https://youtu.be/-Qn4iZgQY8k?si=LFzuAdWgMxB1BpIG https://youtu.be/-Qn4iZgQY8k?si=LFzuAdWgMxB1BpIG
  - JamisonM 1y ago
    That doesn't really make sense, the vast, vast majority of farmland is not close enough to an urban area to be influenced by sprawl and get bid up to development prices.
    - DaveZale 1y ago
      sure, but enough of it is close to urban areas you never lived in California? The urban sprawl there ate up all of the orange groves, for example... in Orange County!
      - JamisonM 1y ago
        Define "enough"? The article in question is about Arkansas and broad acre farming, there is 600+ million acres of farm in the midwest down to the delta 99% of which isn't close to a major population center. There is lots of pressure in areas of California and all up and down the west coast up to Vancouver.. but that is a trivial amount a farm land in the grand scheme of things (and specialized due to climate, water, and market access issues that don't apply to most farm land in the US or really anywhere)
    - larsiusprime 1y ago
      All the subdivisions in Texas that have “ranch” in the name are that way for a reason
duxup 1y ago
>"They all tell me they’re aware of a monopoly problem, and they don’t deny it exists. But they do nothing. Instead, we get bailouts and the money slips right out of our hands and into the big corporations we owe the money to — the monopolies. Meanwhile, those same corporations lobby for us to get the bailouts. Get it?" I get that frustration.
- thayne 1y ago
  It seems like this is becoming a problem across a lot of industries. At least oligopolies.
  - duxup 1y ago
    Meanwhile the farmers in the stories are complaining to politicians likely owned by the entities who benefit from the oligopolies.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Yup, they get lip service and a promise, in return they get votes, and nothing changes because farmers don’t vote for their interests.
      - jondwillis 1y ago
        class and nationalist politics is really all there is at the end of the day, huh.
        dmix 1y ago
        It’s just a natural side effect of state capitalism. When you constantly mix government with business you almost always get a government that props up large old companies and then those businesses directly fund the politicians to back them. National security is then used as a sales pitch to justify helping the big companies when normally it’d be a social angle for smaller ones (or a social angle for internal big company policies). The less government is in the business of subsidies, special tax carveouts, and bailouts the less it happens. Likewise with regulations and IP laws that are often designed by the top companies in their favour. I have a feeling CHIPS is going to a classic example in retrospect, a wealth transfer to stodgy oligopolies, not about market development. Likewise with inventing AI regulations in an immature market before the risks are fully understood.
thisislife2 1y ago
Apparently, Bill Gates is one of the largest private farm land owner - https://landreport.com/farmer-bill-gates https://landreport.com/farmer-bill-gates
- defrost 1y ago
  That's 242,000 acres of farm land - crops, vegetables, etc. Ted Turner has two million acres of personal and ranch land in the US, Gina Rinehart has well over 28 million acres (at the end of 2016 - she has purchased more since then) of "ranch land" in Australia (they're called stations here in Oz). It seems probable that if Bill Gates is the largest single farm land owner of record with the same holding name on all titles then there is likely several larger companies each with multiple subsidiaries that each hold almost as much farm land as Gates with a common subsidiary name such that each larger company controls more farm land by a magnitude than Gates does. I haven't done that work. ( I have done similar work for mineral and energy leases globally though, ownership is generally diversified through a few layers ).
  - larsiusprime 1y ago
    The single largest (legible) landowner by acreage is some timber magnate. Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers
    - defrost 1y ago
      > Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers 1/ Australia doesn't have "ranching" families anymore than it "throws shrimps on the barbie" - that's 'Merkin Engrish there. 2/ Gina Rinehart's massive station holdings come from her mining empire which was inherited from her father Lang Hancock - an iron ore mining magnate. Sure, Lang sprang from Ashburton Downs, a sparse Pilbara lot of land: At the time (1918) it occupied 755,520 acres (3,057 km2) and was stocked with 19,000 sheep and 320 horses. In 1949 the property was carrying a flock of 30,000 sheep, but by 1951, following a severe drought, shearing had to be cancelled as the stock were too weak to be droved to the shearing shed. In 1979 the property was stocked with 300 cattle. In a good season the station is able to carry a herd of approximately 5,000 head of cattle. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashburton_Downs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashburton_Downs but with brothers and an extended family there was no money there to made by Lang, he made his nut spreading mesothelioma * to the world and later convincing others to invest in vast mesa's of dense high grade iron ore, still being mined today. FWiW the Hancock family drama surrounding the control of tens of billions per annum resources makes Dallas look a little rookie .. although Prix d'Amour** is bulldozed and gone now. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Blue_Asbestos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Blue_Asbestos ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Porteous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Porteous
yepitwas 1y ago
Monopolies are a huge problem in every sector of the economy. Republicans and especially Chicago school folks forced a change in how we enforce antitrust in the ‘70s, such that now we hardly enforce it at all. (The resulting concentration of power was, IMO, the first major step toward the entire gestures broadly at everything we’re dealing with now, but putting that aside, it’s definitely been awful for market health in practically every sector) Trump’s trade policies his first term drove away foreign buyers, who didn’t rush back afterward. US farmers rely on exports, as we farm way more than we need to to feed just the US. We had to (well, “had to”) bail farmers out then, because of Trump’s trade policies, and now we may well do it again for the same fucking reason. Wonder who they voted for.
- LastTrain 1y ago
  This is a pattern. Enact shitty policy and then shield red districts from it. Prime example is the MAILS act. Defund the post office then re-fund it in rural districts. Same with rural hospitals. And democrats help them do it because providing help for part of the population is better than none - they should make rural districts suffer the consequences of their votes - I’m tired of subsidizing communities that would not do the same for me.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    > they should make rural districts suffer the consequences of their votes - I’m tired of subsidizing communities that would not do the same for me. being in a society means having a safety net. different people agree on some things and disagree on others. apply the golden rule.
    - throwawaysleep 1y ago
      > being in a society means having a safety net. The people in rural areas strongly disagree with that statement.
      - SilverElfin 1y ago
MattDamonSpace 1y ago
Generic anti-market criticisms from the quoted, without a lot of specifics… Is it just a price issue? External completion? Increased input prices?
- yepitwas 1y ago
  One key claim appears to be that there are so few buyers for their products, and sellers of their inputs (and, speculation on my part, those are maybe sometimes the same parties) that “magically” the numbers always work out that their costs shoot up any time their income does, so their margins always have them right on the edge of failure. (I don’t know how true this is)
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    It's somewhere in the middle. Ex: there isn't a literal potash or nitrogen monopoly, since it's a worldwide market. There is arguably an oligopoly on some levels, and then at the producer level you can see some OPEC style arrangements. They are at the bottom and the players above them have leverage on every level. Unfortunately the way for them to gain power at the base level is to consolidate and grow - agriculture mega-farms - but that's something there also strongly fighting against. Ultimately smaller farmers probably need to be some sort of protected class, which they already sort of are, but not to a proper extent to ensure their survival as they argue. This is the state of things in many countries in the world now, which is something that they see and accept but do not necessarily like, but that won't change policy in regards to Indian dairy Farmers or what have you so there's little prospect except frustration. Even in aggressive trade negotiations with tariffs flying over the seas at full bore, things like fishery rights and such often turn out to be the most steadfast holdouts. Not easy to change. Or perhaps the trend of consolidation will simply continue, and there is an imminent wave of small farm bankruptcy.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  I've posted a similar article on HN about the dairy industry [0] - the economics are the same. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818463
estearum 1y ago
Not a fan of Marxism as a solution, but boy was he right about the trajectory of technological development and the resulting power balances. Don't worry though, AI will totally make it all better. You know so because the wealthiest people in the world insist on it.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  You don't need Marxism - multiple competing farmer cooperatives works as a middle ground between small businesses and capitalism. This is why Indian dairy is outcompeting North American Dairy, and is a model North American farming can adopt [0][1] The economics of American farming fail because 70% of profit is retained by the processor, versus 20-30% in India. Ever ate Mozzarella in the US? It's made using Indian skim dried milk. Same with any sort of artisanal cheese that uses 6-8% milk fat. [0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-to-empire-can-u-s-dairy-learn-from-indias-white-revolution/ https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t... [1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/indias-dairy-revolution-stop-pretending-holsteins-are-kings/ https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/indias-dairy-revo...
  - selimthegrim 1y ago
    Has Amul not been completely captured by the BJP at this point though?
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      Yep. Gujarat BJP. State cooperatives are captured by the ruling party of a state. That said, Amul is just one of 200k cooperatives in India. Verka (Punjab/HP), Nandini (Karnataka), Milma (Kerala), AAVIN (Tamil Nadu), and others generate Amul level profits and are managed by opposition parties. The issue is dairy processors in the US tend to take 70% of profit, versus 20-30% in India, because most processors are themselves cooperative owned. Farmers also tend to "go it alone" in the US, but in South Asia the whole village collaborates. Even Punjabi farmers here in Californa collaborate with each other on capex investments, but the Anglo farmers go it alone. A cooperative ag model would really help Pakistan as well, but that would require destroying the military's monopoly on various segments of the Ag industry which they won't give up.
throw_m239339 1y ago
> “Seed, chemicals or fertilizer, it’s all in the hands of a few companies that are the only game in town. You want to fix farming? Start a federal investigation on those big companies. Booming quarterly earnings and big stock dividends make no sense when farmers can’t pinch a penny.” It's not just AG, it's every single industry today. It's obviously the result of corruption among elected officials and it's a vicious cycle... who finance these candidates political careers? Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them... Corruption is always done at the expense of everybody else... At least in IT, we've got open source software (but not much open source hardware). Imagine a world, where every single IT company would depend on Windows thus Microsoft...
- jen20 1y ago
  We don't need to imagine, it was actually the case not that long ago, and for the most part still is. The MO of corporations is to just bend over when a Microsoft rep walks into the room.
  - KronisLV 1y ago
    Or you can at least look for viable alternatives: https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft-office-windows-for-open-source-alternatives https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft... That way, if/when you decide to switch to the MS offering, at least you can bring up that they’re not the only game in town, to get a better deal.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Tech has the absolute worst price gouging of any industry. The profit margins are totally insane. People complain about Kroger with a 1% margin, if only they knew who was actually bending them over.
  - throwawaysleep 1y ago
    Eh, it is more that tech is so cheap that the money saved switching isn’t worth the time spent to retrain the workforce. There are free alternatives to Microsoft Office, but you would never get your money back using them in a corporate environment, as with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, people come knowing those things. The cost of software is overwhelmingly not the cash price.
djinnandtonic 1y ago
[flagged]
- NotGMan 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    That's not my reading at all. Rather: Farmers hate what monopolies do to them, yet they still strongly vote against candidates and policies that might prevent those monopolies, or curb monopolistic abuse. At best, they've revealed they actually care more about other issues at the polls.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - runako 1y ago
        The current President literally disrupted their export markets last time he was in office. It wasn't a stretch to expect him to continue doing more of the same. The line was "President".
        kulahan 1y ago
        Got it, so there was no line in the article and you’re just whining irrelevantly. Just wanted to be sure before I ignored it as the stupid-ass comment it is.
      - Terr_ 1y ago
        > Which line says they’re voting This one: "The same folks who clapped and cheered as Musk revved a chainsaw". That refers to an event this year after Trump took office, during the Conservative Public Action Conference (CPAC) where Elon Musk made an appearance, then on behalf of the Trump administration. (The falling-out where accused Trump of being a pedophile was later.) With that context, how would you characterize the kind of voter who (A) bothers to tune into CPAC after the election and (B) claps and cheers at the spectacle? It's reasonable to assume they still voted for the guy who said monopolies weren't a problem [0] and sided with monopoly agribusinesses over small farmers [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/business/trump-economy-monopoly.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/business/trump-economy-mo... [1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-ways-trump-administration-failed-rural-america-10-ways-overcome/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-ways-trump-admin...
Animats 1y ago
There's a video of this meeting. All those farmers getting down on their knees to pray for a federal bailout.
rossdavidh 1y ago
On the one hand, there are a lot of unfair market concentration issues working against them. On the other hand, no one today in any other part of the economy would decide they want to start a new business, with small scale, in a commodity market. Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce. I grew up in a farming area in the midwest, and even then (several decades ago) there was no realistic prospect of doing well, but most (not all) farmers insisted on growing corn, soy, or one of a very few other commodity crops. I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well; it doesn't work out in any non-agricultural sector either. Small businesses have to go into niche markets, and that is not a new phenomenon. I recall reading (and hearing) almost exactly these same complaints in the 1980's, straight from the farmers, but the idea of growing other crops just made them irritable. And then, they would cheer the arrival of a big Wal-Mart in town, and go shop there instead of the small store they had been buying from.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- skellington 1y ago
  Yeah but at least they're also destroying the soil to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. for no profit and as an added bonus they get to kill all those pesky insects and bees!
  - cm2012 1y ago
    Generally round up and similar things require less overall pesticide compared to normal crops
    - ehnto 1y ago
      That's a fact that sounds like a good thing, but could just as well be a bad thing. Why does it take less of it, and does that impact the environment downstream less?
      - 1y ago
Cody-99 1y ago
>The entire agriculture industry — a bedrock of U.S. security — rests squarely on the shoulders of the American farmer. Weird thing to have in an article about farmers who primarily export their food.
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  Family farming is just a welfare grift at this point.
- runako 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why it should matter who owns these farms to anyone who doesn't own one. Impact to our food supply seems minimal at best. At worst, we are taking taxes from teachers to send to these rich farmers, which seems like terrible policy.
  - mlinhares 1y ago
    Cos then you'll believe the story and side with the farmer that voted for the leopards and will vote for them again in the next election cos the "coastal elites are out of touch".
  - bfdm 1y ago
    Not a an expert in this area at all, but I suspect there's an aspect here if maintaining productive capacity to replace imported food, if that became unavailable. Cursory searching suggests US food exports are similar in scale to food imports. Roughly speaking, with some adaptation that export capacity could be redirected for domestic nutrition. If, in contrast, you let those farms and skill dry up it would be difficult to rebuild quickly.
    - runako 1y ago
      I get that aspect. My assumption is that due to scale, location, etc., a farm that transitions from its current owner to a different owner will still be a farm with (possibly the same) employees. I don't see 30% of the farmland in Arkansas (assuming a foreclosure rate that high) suddenly becoming new-build city centers, or factories, or suburbs. It works as farmland, someone will probably buy it to use as farmland. I don't see why it's strategically important to the US taxpayer that one millionaire own it vs a different millionaire (or corporation).
runako 1y ago
> 4. The grain industry must diversify. Since these folks by and large do not grow food for people in America to eat, just how important is this to Americans who do not work in ag? Why do we subsidize farmers to produce products for export? Why do we not do that for other industries? Two things are true: farming is very hard & a certain set of rich[1] family farmers are coddled. 1 - Chappell, the farmer in the lede, grows 2,400 acres on an 8,000 acre family farm. That's about $5m of land under cultivation on a farm potentially worth near $20 million. This is the type of farmer we are bailing out. This farmer, who is richer than 99% of Americans, and those like him.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  Well strategically in an economic SHTF situation at least we could theoretically feed our populace with the surplus. But we all know that realistically, at this point, the people in charge would just sell it for a pittance or dump it to manipulate market prices even if 70% of the country was starving— because this is the kind of society we’ve all created.
  - runako 1y ago
    I hear the argument that food is different, I do. What I don't get is why any of us should care _which_ millionaire owns & operates the farm. If one millionaire isn't scaled enough to run it at a profit and has to sell to a richer millionaire or corporation, don't we still have the same net SHTF outcome?
    - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
      Maybe we should nationalize farms so no one has to be hungry?
      - binary132 1y ago
        subsidizing businesses that are trapped in that role is essentially not that different from a nationalized or otherwise centrally planned industry
jondwillis 1y ago
Almost 100 years since the dust bowl! History sure does rhyme. >“Right now, if I was to walk into Congress and ask all the senators and reps, ‘Who thinks the agriculture industry is hurting to the point of collapse?’ all the hands would go up. Instead, the question should be, ‘Who thinks farmers are hurting to the point of collapse?’” >“There’s a giant difference between the two questions, and that difference is indicative of the separation between local Ag and Big Ag,” Buffalo concludes. “Farmers, not the giant agriculture manufacturers, are the ones hurting to the point of going belly up. There’s no solving any of this until that difference is recognized.” I'm not quite gripping why lower-scale farmers are hurting more than "agriculture manufacturers"-- or why those two things should be compared directly. This article seems to conflate agricultural suppliers and industrial-scale agriculture (aka farming.) If it is that small scale farms are less efficient? Then yeah, you're going to need bail-outs WITH BETTER PLANNING, OVERSIGHT, and eventually OUTCOMES, if we want small scale farmers to continue existing (which, btw, I am all for.) Do that while also monopoly-busting suppliers of farming inputs. Also, maybe it sounds like fixing short-term profit motive shareholder capitalism might be implied. hah. But you'd have to do it in a global market-aware framework, as other governments meddle with ag markets in a sometimes adversarial way. To bring it back to the dust bowl, one of the few actually effective programs was to improve ecological practices that prevented dust from blowing as much. And restoration of buffalo grass from buying out farmers' lands and letting it re-naturalize. --- Fun: this article is really heavy on the "for defense", "security" language, even bringing up the Chinese spy balloon for basically no reason. I guess cynically that makes sense. I suppose the irony of pandering to the current crop of American right-wing politicians-- who are accelerating the private-equity gobble-up hellhole expansion faster than ever-- might be lost.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  It’s not just a federal issue though. States like Oregon keep squeezing farmers with heavy handed regulations that seem to be designed to kill small farmers in particular. There are YouTube channels that cover the constant stream of rule changes and orders that make life hard for them.
zer00eyz 1y ago
It's not (only) Ag Monopolies. Every one, at every step in the supply chain is over leveraged. When credit was cheap(free) every one at every step in the chain borrowed heavily. Farmers, Suppliers, Buyers. Now that the bills are due (it's all commercial paper most had 5 year terms) the last of it is now running through the banks there is NO wiggle room left. Why are farmers squeezed out? Because they have little control over their direct costs (equipment, seed, fertilizer) are heavy users of credit, and dont control the value of their sales. Honestly the writing was on the wall -- farmers know that crop marketing (when to sell, what to sell as a futures contract) is a big part of what they do. The services they pay for to help them in this task got it very wrong. This is contrary to the data they had, and may have been motivated by emotional choices regarding the political climate and outcomes...
- SpicyUme 1y ago
  A saying I've heard a few places, including from farming friends, is farming is an industry where they buy at retail and sell at wholesale. Unfortunately most of the money in farming seems to be holding onto land until it appreciates and can be sold.
  - SilverElfin 1y ago
    The “buy at retail and sell at wholesale” is a good observation. But even land appreciation is not guaranteed. Some states are modifying the water regulations or land use regulation in a way that makes it practically impossible to operate a farm and therefore reduces the land value.
legitster 1y ago
The entire commodity farming industry is built around exporting en masse to developing countries. In very few industries does it make sense to export industrial inputs at dollars on the ton to places like China. It's a miracle of technology that it's even possible. Let alone the government subsidies, nitrate imports, immigrant labor, and major corporate consolidation that it requires. Needless to say, this current administration is the perfect storm of every policy needed to destroy this domestic industry.
ggm 1y ago
I have massive sympathy with the farmers, and farming communities. So if I ask if they "should" have more rights than say hired agricultural workers regarding the value of their labour, and their exposure to risk, it doesn't mean I think what's happening is good, or fair. I am sceptical farmers have any specific quality distinct from all other labour, exposed to monopoly capital. There's a long history of reverence for the keepers of the land, on left and right, and there have been specific political carve outs for farmers, good and bad from the left and right. They were lied to, capturing their votes, and now suffer the consequences. There's also a "dis-intermediation" element to this, structural efficiency drives are squeezing their margins which matter for longterm resilience. Food is strategic. I think it should be managed as a strategic asset more than for its balance of payments impact. Life on the land is hard. We should be kinder, but then, so should farming communities, voting for liars.
seatac76 1y ago
Bloomberg did a piece on Iowa having water issues due to Big Ag. The video was eye opening https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-03/big-agriculture-is-stopping-polluted-water-from-being-cleaned-in-iowa?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-03/big-agric...
JamisonM 1y ago
From the article: In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. “My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead,” Graves describes. “That’s 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.” Couple of things here: - Where I farm we grow 40-50bu beans most years, rarely hit 180bu corn and, not cited as reference points above, wheat in the 60's, Oats around 130, and Canola in the 40's. All of which is to say $400/ac revenue is a pretty easy target to hit. Our costs, besides land values are essentially the same as farmer in Arkansas and things aren't all that bad for me, so what gives? - Who honestly thinks that 25% of Arkansas farmers are going to go bankrupt in the next 3 years? (I don't know what report he is citing or the timeline so I just picked a timeline that seems reasonable.) My bet is no one. I looked up Arkansas land values and good ground seems to go for under $5,000USD an acre, not much different from where I farm - is there some crazy extra cost that American farmers bear that I am unaware of? As a Canadian I hear American farmers whining all the time about how tough things are and I just don't get it. Things are not as good as they were in some recent crop years but overall profitability is not a big issue. https://www.arfb.com/uploads/pages/arkansas_land_values_2024_september_2024.pdf https://www.arfb.com/uploads/pages/arkansas_land_values_2024... These monopolies, if they were so powerful, would be squeezing farmers so bad that land values would be dropping, not rising... but land values keep going up. Profits are being plowed into fixed assets, which means that there are profits - that's the economics of the thing, right?
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  You don’t understand America because you don’t live in America. Monopolies drive up land prices to squeeze out people who can’t afford the land.
  - JamisonM 1y ago
    OK, what secret information do you have from living in America that I don't have? I got people driving land prices up here too.. they have driven them up to roughly the same as Arkansas and I can still afford to buy land from time to time. Do explain.
jbm 1y ago
I think one of the more interesting stories about this that is being missed is the comments being left under videos related to this. I legitimately don't know if they are bots (because the comments are all too similar) or if they are the just sneering Redditors en masse. I can certainly imagine both scenarios, although I'm going to guess it is more likely to be bots. Two examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYtabeCROY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYtabeCROY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_N3g986TiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_N3g986TiE
- UltraSane 1y ago
  What is wrong about the top two comments? They seem pretty accurate.
  - jbm 1y ago
    It isn't the sentiment, but rather the omnipresence of the most extreme version of the sentiment, that makes it seem artificial. It's not as if states like Iowa voting for a conservative figure is a surprise. (They voted against FDR during WW2) I've never heard a liberal American IRL express more than mild distaste for farmers and their subsidies. I've certainly not seen enough IRL vitrol for people to engage in page after page of Reddit / Herman Cain award style comments on news comment sections on Youtube. I can imagine the farmer handout being seen as offensive when conservative activists opposed bailing out student loans, but other countries do very similar things (Canada certainly does). It's just not political to give money to farmers, even when they are millionaires. Additional consolidation of farms will just lead to more egg price hikes when bird flu spreads to mega flocks on mega farms. The other reason this doesn't seem real is that normally you'd have an angle behind this other than "Ha, you guys are fucked". Instead it just seems to be comments geared at arousing maximum anger, which seems like something I would do if I wanted acceleration vs. change. I've also seen similar comments before, like the "Ha ha you didn't vote for Kamala and Gaza is in flames because of you". It might be people terminally online, but it strikes me as being inorganic, not real.
    - UltraSane 1y ago
voidfunc 1y ago
[flagged]
robocat 1y ago
Middle of the value chain: getting profits relentlessly squeezed if you're inbetween powerful players. Farmers have no monopoly power (and any collision would be difficult or illegal). Amazing to read it so clearly - although we see in other industries.
- robocat 1y ago
  s/collision/collusion
newman314 1y ago
I saw a TikTok of someone saying that farmers are not stupid (due to the wide variety of skills to successfully farm) and were just betting on Trump not actually going through with tariffs. It's hard to have any sympathy for such cynical behavior while simultaneously asking for handouts. Especially since the same people probably voted against others getting social services.
nromiun 1y ago
Turns out trade wars are not that easy to win.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Trump voters dealing with trump tariffs. I want this to be more nuanced, but that's it.
r0ckarong 1y ago
Guess what name never once shows up in this piece.
user3939382 1y ago
End NAFTA. Our government neither works for nor answers to us.
throwaway234562 1y ago
What is genuinely perplexing is that the farmers in the article are complaining about 'big ag' and monopolies, yet they turn around and overwhelmingly vote for Republicans which routinely implement policies that benefit precisely the very same 'big ag' when they are in power and do the absolute best to block action against large corporations when not in power. Sad to say, but you get the govt you vote for and these farmers are exhibit A for the saying 'elections have consequences'. They were happy to vote for retarded policies just because they were promised that the 'others' would be hurt more and that their 'freedoms' were under attack. Now that that the chickens have come home to roost, they are crying foul.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > get the govt you vote for and these farmers are exhibit A for the saying 'elections have consequences'. To be fair, that's exactly why the farmers started voting Republican in the first place, despite being traditionally Democrats. In the 90s they got the Democrats they voted for — and it ended badly. Once bitten, twice shy. And now that they have been twice bitten it is going to be a really tough choice in a two party system. While you do make a great point that party brand means absolutely nothing and that at each election you need to closely examine the specific people you intend to elect, it is also easy to say that from a point of privilege where you can sit around writing stupid comments on the internet. It is not so easy to conduct that deep research when you have actual responsibilities in life. It is understandable why people latch onto a brand and judge it based on past performance.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    Yeah, there's been (until this year) zero difference between the parties on economic/trade policy since 1992 when the Clinton campaign had "It's the economy, stupid" as its slogan to remind them the one thing that matters most in elections. Unfortunately, they, like the Bush Republicans, meant the stock market and global trade deals for their friends when they said "economy." So if you were a typically conservative-ish farmer, you could vote for the party that was going to screw you economically and trash your culture, or the party that would screw you economically and maybe pretend to stand up for your culture sometimes. Not a happy choice, but if you were going to bother to vote, an easy one.

174 points by strict9 1y ago

farming is hard. around here, cities will buy up farms just for the water rights, so the land prices are so high, nobody sane would go into that business. forget all the high tech AI laser weeding machines. those might add an edge to large, already successful operations. Getting started or renewing a failed operation is a 24 hour per day job. Sure, it's a crisis

zdragnar 1y ago
Generations of family farms have been selling out over the course of my life due to the bad economics. Dairy farms consolidate, and fields are worth more for building houses on than for growing corn or soy or wheat. It used to be at least one of the kids would take over the farm, but now as parents age out, there's simply too many better opportunities with less hard effort out there and fewer are interested in staying in the business.
- duxup 1y ago
  I think there's a good argument that farming has always been difficult and the ideal of the quaint family farm was really not very pleasant in reality much of the time. A local university ran some numbers a while back and noted that the early farmstead plots in the US were not large enough to support a farm for long, even at that time.
larsiusprime 1y ago
Indeed. One of the chief causes of high land prices for farmland is unmet demand for housing in the urban core, so farm and ranch land gets bid up to development prices. A lot of advocates of building restrictions did it in the name of preserving nature/farmland/greenspace, but in many ways it’s had the opposite effect: https://youtu.be/-Qn4iZgQY8k?si=LFzuAdWgMxB1BpIG https://youtu.be/-Qn4iZgQY8k?si=LFzuAdWgMxB1BpIG
- JamisonM 1y ago
  That doesn't really make sense, the vast, vast majority of farmland is not close enough to an urban area to be influenced by sprawl and get bid up to development prices.
  - DaveZale 1y ago
    sure, but enough of it is close to urban areas you never lived in California? The urban sprawl there ate up all of the orange groves, for example... in Orange County!
    - JamisonM 1y ago
      Define "enough"? The article in question is about Arkansas and broad acre farming, there is 600+ million acres of farm in the midwest down to the delta 99% of which isn't close to a major population center. There is lots of pressure in areas of California and all up and down the west coast up to Vancouver.. but that is a trivial amount a farm land in the grand scheme of things (and specialized due to climate, water, and market access issues that don't apply to most farm land in the US or really anywhere)
  - larsiusprime 1y ago
    All the subdivisions in Texas that have “ranch” in the name are that way for a reason

duxup 1y ago

>"They all tell me they’re aware of a monopoly problem, and they don’t deny it exists. But they do nothing. Instead, we get bailouts and the money slips right out of our hands and into the big corporations we owe the money to — the monopolies. Meanwhile, those same corporations lobby for us to get the bailouts. Get it?" I get that frustration.

thayne 1y ago
It seems like this is becoming a problem across a lot of industries. At least oligopolies.
- duxup 1y ago
  Meanwhile the farmers in the stories are complaining to politicians likely owned by the entities who benefit from the oligopolies.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Yup, they get lip service and a promise, in return they get votes, and nothing changes because farmers don’t vote for their interests.
    - jondwillis 1y ago
      class and nationalist politics is really all there is at the end of the day, huh.
      - dmix 1y ago
        It’s just a natural side effect of state capitalism. When you constantly mix government with business you almost always get a government that props up large old companies and then those businesses directly fund the politicians to back them. National security is then used as a sales pitch to justify helping the big companies when normally it’d be a social angle for smaller ones (or a social angle for internal big company policies). The less government is in the business of subsidies, special tax carveouts, and bailouts the less it happens. Likewise with regulations and IP laws that are often designed by the top companies in their favour. I have a feeling CHIPS is going to a classic example in retrospect, a wealth transfer to stodgy oligopolies, not about market development. Likewise with inventing AI regulations in an immature market before the risks are fully understood.

thisislife2 1y ago

Apparently, Bill Gates is one of the largest private farm land owner - https://landreport.com/farmer-bill-gates https://landreport.com/farmer-bill-gates

defrost 1y ago
That's 242,000 acres of farm land - crops, vegetables, etc. Ted Turner has two million acres of personal and ranch land in the US, Gina Rinehart has well over 28 million acres (at the end of 2016 - she has purchased more since then) of "ranch land" in Australia (they're called stations here in Oz). It seems probable that if Bill Gates is the largest single farm land owner of record with the same holding name on all titles then there is likely several larger companies each with multiple subsidiaries that each hold almost as much farm land as Gates with a common subsidiary name such that each larger company controls more farm land by a magnitude than Gates does. I haven't done that work. ( I have done similar work for mineral and energy leases globally though, ownership is generally diversified through a few layers ).
- larsiusprime 1y ago
  The single largest (legible) landowner by acreage is some timber magnate. Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers
  - defrost 1y ago
    > Over in Australia a few ranching families own so much land it makes the American figures look like rookie numbers 1/ Australia doesn't have "ranching" families anymore than it "throws shrimps on the barbie" - that's 'Merkin Engrish there. 2/ Gina Rinehart's massive station holdings come from her mining empire which was inherited from her father Lang Hancock - an iron ore mining magnate. Sure, Lang sprang from Ashburton Downs, a sparse Pilbara lot of land: At the time (1918) it occupied 755,520 acres (3,057 km2) and was stocked with 19,000 sheep and 320 horses. In 1949 the property was carrying a flock of 30,000 sheep, but by 1951, following a severe drought, shearing had to be cancelled as the stock were too weak to be droved to the shearing shed. In 1979 the property was stocked with 300 cattle. In a good season the station is able to carry a herd of approximately 5,000 head of cattle. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashburton_Downs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashburton_Downs but with brothers and an extended family there was no money there to made by Lang, he made his nut spreading mesothelioma * to the world and later convincing others to invest in vast mesa's of dense high grade iron ore, still being mined today. FWiW the Hancock family drama surrounding the control of tens of billions per annum resources makes Dallas look a little rookie .. although Prix d'Amour** is bulldozed and gone now. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Blue_Asbestos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Blue_Asbestos ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Porteous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Porteous

yepitwas 1y ago

Monopolies are a huge problem in every sector of the economy. Republicans and especially Chicago school folks forced a change in how we enforce antitrust in the ‘70s, such that now we hardly enforce it at all. (The resulting concentration of power was, IMO, the first major step toward the entire gestures broadly at everything we’re dealing with now, but putting that aside, it’s definitely been awful for market health in practically every sector) Trump’s trade policies his first term drove away foreign buyers, who didn’t rush back afterward. US farmers rely on exports, as we farm way more than we need to to feed just the US. We had to (well, “had to”) bail farmers out then, because of Trump’s trade policies, and now we may well do it again for the same fucking reason. Wonder who they voted for.

LastTrain 1y ago
This is a pattern. Enact shitty policy and then shield red districts from it. Prime example is the MAILS act. Defund the post office then re-fund it in rural districts. Same with rural hospitals. And democrats help them do it because providing help for part of the population is better than none - they should make rural districts suffer the consequences of their votes - I’m tired of subsidizing communities that would not do the same for me.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > they should make rural districts suffer the consequences of their votes - I’m tired of subsidizing communities that would not do the same for me. being in a society means having a safety net. different people agree on some things and disagree on others. apply the golden rule.
  - throwawaysleep 1y ago
    > being in a society means having a safety net. The people in rural areas strongly disagree with that statement.
    - SilverElfin 1y ago

MattDamonSpace 1y ago

Generic anti-market criticisms from the quoted, without a lot of specifics… Is it just a price issue? External completion? Increased input prices?

yepitwas 1y ago
One key claim appears to be that there are so few buyers for their products, and sellers of their inputs (and, speculation on my part, those are maybe sometimes the same parties) that “magically” the numbers always work out that their costs shoot up any time their income does, so their margins always have them right on the edge of failure. (I don’t know how true this is)
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  It's somewhere in the middle. Ex: there isn't a literal potash or nitrogen monopoly, since it's a worldwide market. There is arguably an oligopoly on some levels, and then at the producer level you can see some OPEC style arrangements. They are at the bottom and the players above them have leverage on every level. Unfortunately the way for them to gain power at the base level is to consolidate and grow - agriculture mega-farms - but that's something there also strongly fighting against. Ultimately smaller farmers probably need to be some sort of protected class, which they already sort of are, but not to a proper extent to ensure their survival as they argue. This is the state of things in many countries in the world now, which is something that they see and accept but do not necessarily like, but that won't change policy in regards to Indian dairy Farmers or what have you so there's little prospect except frustration. Even in aggressive trade negotiations with tariffs flying over the seas at full bore, things like fishery rights and such often turn out to be the most steadfast holdouts. Not easy to change. Or perhaps the trend of consolidation will simply continue, and there is an imminent wave of small farm bankruptcy.
alephnerd 1y ago
I've posted a similar article on HN about the dairy industry [0] - the economics are the same. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818463

estearum 1y ago

Not a fan of Marxism as a solution, but boy was he right about the trajectory of technological development and the resulting power balances. Don't worry though, AI will totally make it all better. You know so because the wealthiest people in the world insist on it.

alephnerd 1y ago
You don't need Marxism - multiple competing farmer cooperatives works as a middle ground between small businesses and capitalism. This is why Indian dairy is outcompeting North American Dairy, and is a model North American farming can adopt [0][1] The economics of American farming fail because 70% of profit is retained by the processor, versus 20-30% in India. Ever ate Mozzarella in the US? It's made using Indian skim dried milk. Same with any sort of artisanal cheese that uses 6-8% milk fat. [0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-to-empire-can-u-s-dairy-learn-from-indias-white-revolution/ https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t... [1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/indias-dairy-revolution-stop-pretending-holsteins-are-kings/ https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/indias-dairy-revo...
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  Has Amul not been completely captured by the BJP at this point though?
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Yep. Gujarat BJP. State cooperatives are captured by the ruling party of a state. That said, Amul is just one of 200k cooperatives in India. Verka (Punjab/HP), Nandini (Karnataka), Milma (Kerala), AAVIN (Tamil Nadu), and others generate Amul level profits and are managed by opposition parties. The issue is dairy processors in the US tend to take 70% of profit, versus 20-30% in India, because most processors are themselves cooperative owned. Farmers also tend to "go it alone" in the US, but in South Asia the whole village collaborates. Even Punjabi farmers here in Californa collaborate with each other on capex investments, but the Anglo farmers go it alone. A cooperative ag model would really help Pakistan as well, but that would require destroying the military's monopoly on various segments of the Ag industry which they won't give up.

throw_m239339 1y ago

> “Seed, chemicals or fertilizer, it’s all in the hands of a few companies that are the only game in town. You want to fix farming? Start a federal investigation on those big companies. Booming quarterly earnings and big stock dividends make no sense when farmers can’t pinch a penny.” It's not just AG, it's every single industry today. It's obviously the result of corruption among elected officials and it's a vicious cycle... who finance these candidates political careers? Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them... Corruption is always done at the expense of everybody else... At least in IT, we've got open source software (but not much open source hardware). Imagine a world, where every single IT company would depend on Windows thus Microsoft...

jen20 1y ago
We don't need to imagine, it was actually the case not that long ago, and for the most part still is. The MO of corporations is to just bend over when a Microsoft rep walks into the room.
- KronisLV 1y ago
  Or you can at least look for viable alternatives: https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft-office-windows-for-open-source-alternatives https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft... That way, if/when you decide to switch to the MS offering, at least you can bring up that they’re not the only game in town, to get a better deal.
Workaccount2 1y ago
Tech has the absolute worst price gouging of any industry. The profit margins are totally insane. People complain about Kroger with a 1% margin, if only they knew who was actually bending them over.
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  Eh, it is more that tech is so cheap that the money saved switching isn’t worth the time spent to retrain the workforce. There are free alternatives to Microsoft Office, but you would never get your money back using them in a corporate environment, as with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, people come knowing those things. The cost of software is overwhelmingly not the cash price.

djinnandtonic 1y ago

[flagged]

NotGMan 1y ago
[flagged]
- Terr_ 1y ago
  That's not my reading at all. Rather: Farmers hate what monopolies do to them, yet they still strongly vote against candidates and policies that might prevent those monopolies, or curb monopolistic abuse. At best, they've revealed they actually care more about other issues at the polls.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - runako 1y ago
      The current President literally disrupted their export markets last time he was in office. It wasn't a stretch to expect him to continue doing more of the same. The line was "President".
      - kulahan 1y ago
        Got it, so there was no line in the article and you’re just whining irrelevantly. Just wanted to be sure before I ignored it as the stupid-ass comment it is.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > Which line says they’re voting This one: "The same folks who clapped and cheered as Musk revved a chainsaw". That refers to an event this year after Trump took office, during the Conservative Public Action Conference (CPAC) where Elon Musk made an appearance, then on behalf of the Trump administration. (The falling-out where accused Trump of being a pedophile was later.) With that context, how would you characterize the kind of voter who (A) bothers to tune into CPAC after the election and (B) claps and cheers at the spectacle? It's reasonable to assume they still voted for the guy who said monopolies weren't a problem [0] and sided with monopoly agribusinesses over small farmers [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/business/trump-economy-monopoly.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/business/trump-economy-mo... [1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-ways-trump-administration-failed-rural-america-10-ways-overcome/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-ways-trump-admin...

Animats 1y ago

There's a video of this meeting. All those farmers getting down on their knees to pray for a federal bailout.

rossdavidh 1y ago

On the one hand, there are a lot of unfair market concentration issues working against them. On the other hand, no one today in any other part of the economy would decide they want to start a new business, with small scale, in a commodity market. Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce. I grew up in a farming area in the midwest, and even then (several decades ago) there was no realistic prospect of doing well, but most (not all) farmers insisted on growing corn, soy, or one of a very few other commodity crops. I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well; it doesn't work out in any non-agricultural sector either. Small businesses have to go into niche markets, and that is not a new phenomenon. I recall reading (and hearing) almost exactly these same complaints in the 1980's, straight from the farmers, but the idea of growing other crops just made them irritable. And then, they would cheer the arrival of a big Wal-Mart in town, and go shop there instead of the small store they had been buying from.

deleted 1y ago
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skellington 1y ago
Yeah but at least they're also destroying the soil to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. for no profit and as an added bonus they get to kill all those pesky insects and bees!
- cm2012 1y ago
  Generally round up and similar things require less overall pesticide compared to normal crops
  - ehnto 1y ago
    That's a fact that sounds like a good thing, but could just as well be a bad thing. Why does it take less of it, and does that impact the environment downstream less?
    - 1y ago

Cody-99 1y ago

>The entire agriculture industry — a bedrock of U.S. security — rests squarely on the shoulders of the American farmer. Weird thing to have in an article about farmers who primarily export their food.

throwawaysleep 1y ago
Family farming is just a welfare grift at this point.
runako 1y ago
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why it should matter who owns these farms to anyone who doesn't own one. Impact to our food supply seems minimal at best. At worst, we are taking taxes from teachers to send to these rich farmers, which seems like terrible policy.
- mlinhares 1y ago
  Cos then you'll believe the story and side with the farmer that voted for the leopards and will vote for them again in the next election cos the "coastal elites are out of touch".
- bfdm 1y ago
  Not a an expert in this area at all, but I suspect there's an aspect here if maintaining productive capacity to replace imported food, if that became unavailable. Cursory searching suggests US food exports are similar in scale to food imports. Roughly speaking, with some adaptation that export capacity could be redirected for domestic nutrition. If, in contrast, you let those farms and skill dry up it would be difficult to rebuild quickly.
  - runako 1y ago
    I get that aspect. My assumption is that due to scale, location, etc., a farm that transitions from its current owner to a different owner will still be a farm with (possibly the same) employees. I don't see 30% of the farmland in Arkansas (assuming a foreclosure rate that high) suddenly becoming new-build city centers, or factories, or suburbs. It works as farmland, someone will probably buy it to use as farmland. I don't see why it's strategically important to the US taxpayer that one millionaire own it vs a different millionaire (or corporation).

runako 1y ago

> 4. The grain industry must diversify. Since these folks by and large do not grow food for people in America to eat, just how important is this to Americans who do not work in ag? Why do we subsidize farmers to produce products for export? Why do we not do that for other industries? Two things are true: farming is very hard & a certain set of rich[1] family farmers are coddled. 1 - Chappell, the farmer in the lede, grows 2,400 acres on an 8,000 acre family farm. That's about $5m of land under cultivation on a farm potentially worth near $20 million. This is the type of farmer we are bailing out. This farmer, who is richer than 99% of Americans, and those like him.

DrewADesign 1y ago
Well strategically in an economic SHTF situation at least we could theoretically feed our populace with the surplus. But we all know that realistically, at this point, the people in charge would just sell it for a pittance or dump it to manipulate market prices even if 70% of the country was starving— because this is the kind of society we’ve all created.
- runako 1y ago
  I hear the argument that food is different, I do. What I don't get is why any of us should care _which_ millionaire owns & operates the farm. If one millionaire isn't scaled enough to run it at a profit and has to sell to a richer millionaire or corporation, don't we still have the same net SHTF outcome?
  - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
    Maybe we should nationalize farms so no one has to be hungry?
    - binary132 1y ago
      subsidizing businesses that are trapped in that role is essentially not that different from a nationalized or otherwise centrally planned industry

jondwillis 1y ago

Almost 100 years since the dust bowl! History sure does rhyme. >“Right now, if I was to walk into Congress and ask all the senators and reps, ‘Who thinks the agriculture industry is hurting to the point of collapse?’ all the hands would go up. Instead, the question should be, ‘Who thinks farmers are hurting to the point of collapse?’” >“There’s a giant difference between the two questions, and that difference is indicative of the separation between local Ag and Big Ag,” Buffalo concludes. “Farmers, not the giant agriculture manufacturers, are the ones hurting to the point of going belly up. There’s no solving any of this until that difference is recognized.” I'm not quite gripping why lower-scale farmers are hurting more than "agriculture manufacturers"-- or why those two things should be compared directly. This article seems to conflate agricultural suppliers and industrial-scale agriculture (aka farming.) If it is that small scale farms are less efficient? Then yeah, you're going to need bail-outs WITH BETTER PLANNING, OVERSIGHT, and eventually OUTCOMES, if we want small scale farmers to continue existing (which, btw, I am all for.) Do that while also monopoly-busting suppliers of farming inputs. Also, maybe it sounds like fixing short-term profit motive shareholder capitalism might be implied. hah. But you'd have to do it in a global market-aware framework, as other governments meddle with ag markets in a sometimes adversarial way. To bring it back to the dust bowl, one of the few actually effective programs was to improve ecological practices that prevented dust from blowing as much. And restoration of buffalo grass from buying out farmers' lands and letting it re-naturalize. --- Fun: this article is really heavy on the "for defense", "security" language, even bringing up the Chinese spy balloon for basically no reason. I guess cynically that makes sense. I suppose the irony of pandering to the current crop of American right-wing politicians-- who are accelerating the private-equity gobble-up hellhole expansion faster than ever-- might be lost.

SilverElfin 1y ago
It’s not just a federal issue though. States like Oregon keep squeezing farmers with heavy handed regulations that seem to be designed to kill small farmers in particular. There are YouTube channels that cover the constant stream of rule changes and orders that make life hard for them.

zer00eyz 1y ago

It's not (only) Ag Monopolies. Every one, at every step in the supply chain is over leveraged. When credit was cheap(free) every one at every step in the chain borrowed heavily. Farmers, Suppliers, Buyers. Now that the bills are due (it's all commercial paper most had 5 year terms) the last of it is now running through the banks there is NO wiggle room left. Why are farmers squeezed out? Because they have little control over their direct costs (equipment, seed, fertilizer) are heavy users of credit, and dont control the value of their sales. Honestly the writing was on the wall -- farmers know that crop marketing (when to sell, what to sell as a futures contract) is a big part of what they do. The services they pay for to help them in this task got it very wrong. This is contrary to the data they had, and may have been motivated by emotional choices regarding the political climate and outcomes...

SpicyUme 1y ago
A saying I've heard a few places, including from farming friends, is farming is an industry where they buy at retail and sell at wholesale. Unfortunately most of the money in farming seems to be holding onto land until it appreciates and can be sold.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  The “buy at retail and sell at wholesale” is a good observation. But even land appreciation is not guaranteed. Some states are modifying the water regulations or land use regulation in a way that makes it practically impossible to operate a farm and therefore reduces the land value.

legitster 1y ago

The entire commodity farming industry is built around exporting en masse to developing countries. In very few industries does it make sense to export industrial inputs at dollars on the ton to places like China. It's a miracle of technology that it's even possible. Let alone the government subsidies, nitrate imports, immigrant labor, and major corporate consolidation that it requires. Needless to say, this current administration is the perfect storm of every policy needed to destroy this domestic industry.

ggm 1y ago

I have massive sympathy with the farmers, and farming communities. So if I ask if they "should" have more rights than say hired agricultural workers regarding the value of their labour, and their exposure to risk, it doesn't mean I think what's happening is good, or fair. I am sceptical farmers have any specific quality distinct from all other labour, exposed to monopoly capital. There's a long history of reverence for the keepers of the land, on left and right, and there have been specific political carve outs for farmers, good and bad from the left and right. They were lied to, capturing their votes, and now suffer the consequences. There's also a "dis-intermediation" element to this, structural efficiency drives are squeezing their margins which matter for longterm resilience. Food is strategic. I think it should be managed as a strategic asset more than for its balance of payments impact. Life on the land is hard. We should be kinder, but then, so should farming communities, voting for liars.

seatac76 1y ago

Bloomberg did a piece on Iowa having water issues due to Big Ag. The video was eye opening https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-03/big-agriculture-is-stopping-polluted-water-from-being-cleaned-in-iowa?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-03/big-agric...

JamisonM 1y ago

From the article: In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. “My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead,” Graves describes. “That’s 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.” Couple of things here: - Where I farm we grow 40-50bu beans most years, rarely hit 180bu corn and, not cited as reference points above, wheat in the 60's, Oats around 130, and Canola in the 40's. All of which is to say $400/ac revenue is a pretty easy target to hit. Our costs, besides land values are essentially the same as farmer in Arkansas and things aren't all that bad for me, so what gives? - Who honestly thinks that 25% of Arkansas farmers are going to go bankrupt in the next 3 years? (I don't know what report he is citing or the timeline so I just picked a timeline that seems reasonable.) My bet is no one. I looked up Arkansas land values and good ground seems to go for under $5,000USD an acre, not much different from where I farm - is there some crazy extra cost that American farmers bear that I am unaware of? As a Canadian I hear American farmers whining all the time about how tough things are and I just don't get it. Things are not as good as they were in some recent crop years but overall profitability is not a big issue. https://www.arfb.com/uploads/pages/arkansas_land_values_2024_september_2024.pdf https://www.arfb.com/uploads/pages/arkansas_land_values_2024... These monopolies, if they were so powerful, would be squeezing farmers so bad that land values would be dropping, not rising... but land values keep going up. Profits are being plowed into fixed assets, which means that there are profits - that's the economics of the thing, right?

FollowingTheDao 1y ago
You don’t understand America because you don’t live in America. Monopolies drive up land prices to squeeze out people who can’t afford the land.
- JamisonM 1y ago
  OK, what secret information do you have from living in America that I don't have? I got people driving land prices up here too.. they have driven them up to roughly the same as Arkansas and I can still afford to buy land from time to time. Do explain.

jbm 1y ago

I think one of the more interesting stories about this that is being missed is the comments being left under videos related to this. I legitimately don't know if they are bots (because the comments are all too similar) or if they are the just sneering Redditors en masse. I can certainly imagine both scenarios, although I'm going to guess it is more likely to be bots. Two examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYtabeCROY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYtabeCROY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_N3g986TiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_N3g986TiE

UltraSane 1y ago
What is wrong about the top two comments? They seem pretty accurate.
- jbm 1y ago
  It isn't the sentiment, but rather the omnipresence of the most extreme version of the sentiment, that makes it seem artificial. It's not as if states like Iowa voting for a conservative figure is a surprise. (They voted against FDR during WW2) I've never heard a liberal American IRL express more than mild distaste for farmers and their subsidies. I've certainly not seen enough IRL vitrol for people to engage in page after page of Reddit / Herman Cain award style comments on news comment sections on Youtube. I can imagine the farmer handout being seen as offensive when conservative activists opposed bailing out student loans, but other countries do very similar things (Canada certainly does). It's just not political to give money to farmers, even when they are millionaires. Additional consolidation of farms will just lead to more egg price hikes when bird flu spreads to mega flocks on mega farms. The other reason this doesn't seem real is that normally you'd have an angle behind this other than "Ha, you guys are fucked". Instead it just seems to be comments geared at arousing maximum anger, which seems like something I would do if I wanted acceleration vs. change. I've also seen similar comments before, like the "Ha ha you didn't vote for Kamala and Gaza is in flames because of you". It might be people terminally online, but it strikes me as being inorganic, not real.
  - UltraSane 1y ago

voidfunc 1y ago

[flagged]

robocat 1y ago

Middle of the value chain: getting profits relentlessly squeezed if you're inbetween powerful players. Farmers have no monopoly power (and any collision would be difficult or illegal). Amazing to read it so clearly - although we see in other industries.

robocat 1y ago
s/collision/collusion

newman314 1y ago

I saw a TikTok of someone saying that farmers are not stupid (due to the wide variety of skills to successfully farm) and were just betting on Trump not actually going through with tariffs. It's hard to have any sympathy for such cynical behavior while simultaneously asking for handouts. Especially since the same people probably voted against others getting social services.

nromiun 1y ago

Turns out trade wars are not that easy to win.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

Trump voters dealing with trump tariffs. I want this to be more nuanced, but that's it.

r0ckarong 1y ago

Guess what name never once shows up in this piece.

user3939382 1y ago

End NAFTA. Our government neither works for nor answers to us.

throwaway234562 1y ago

What is genuinely perplexing is that the farmers in the article are complaining about 'big ag' and monopolies, yet they turn around and overwhelmingly vote for Republicans which routinely implement policies that benefit precisely the very same 'big ag' when they are in power and do the absolute best to block action against large corporations when not in power. Sad to say, but you get the govt you vote for and these farmers are exhibit A for the saying 'elections have consequences'. They were happy to vote for retarded policies just because they were promised that the 'others' would be hurt more and that their 'freedoms' were under attack. Now that that the chickens have come home to roost, they are crying foul.

9rx 1y ago
> get the govt you vote for and these farmers are exhibit A for the saying 'elections have consequences'. To be fair, that's exactly why the farmers started voting Republican in the first place, despite being traditionally Democrats. In the 90s they got the Democrats they voted for — and it ended badly. Once bitten, twice shy. And now that they have been twice bitten it is going to be a really tough choice in a two party system. While you do make a great point that party brand means absolutely nothing and that at each election you need to closely examine the specific people you intend to elect, it is also easy to say that from a point of privilege where you can sit around writing stupid comments on the internet. It is not so easy to conduct that deep research when you have actual responsibilities in life. It is understandable why people latch onto a brand and judge it based on past performance.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  Yeah, there's been (until this year) zero difference between the parties on economic/trade policy since 1992 when the Clinton campaign had "It's the economy, stupid" as its slogan to remind them the one thing that matters most in elections. Unfortunately, they, like the Bush Republicans, meant the stock market and global trade deals for their friends when they said "economy." So if you were a typically conservative-ish farmer, you could vote for the party that was going to screw you economically and trash your culture, or the party that would screw you economically and maybe pretend to stand up for your culture sometimes. Not a happy choice, but if you were going to bother to vote, an easy one.