13 ms·

Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

284 points by toomuchtodo 10mo ago

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
https://www.fb.org/news-release/agricultural-groups-sound-alarm-about-farmers-future https://www.fb.org/news-release/agricultural-groups-sound-al...
estearum 10mo ago
[flagged]
- Drupon 10mo ago
  This isn't reddit.
reactordev 10mo ago
There’s only two meat packers… two. Where are the cattle farmers to go? It’s like this across the industry thanks to monopolies like ConAgra, Tyson’s, etc.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  Breaking up monopolies and giving farm workers strong unions would go a long way to improving the situation.
  - tstrimple 10mo ago
    You'll never guess which group is consistently against unions!
- mlrtime 10mo ago
  There are many many meat packers, or you just mean two big ones?
  - reactordev 10mo ago
    “The U.S. meatpacking industry is dominated by the "Big Four"—Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—which control 80-85% of the beef market and significant portions of poultry and pork”
    - tbyehl 10mo ago
      It's so much worse for poultry. My state and the bordering states represent more than half of US production and there's exactly one USDA facility available to independent producers. They're quite small and the cost approaches today's retail price for a whole Tyson chicken. There are USDA exemptions for tiny producers (up to 20K/yr vs 150K+ for a single modern broiler house) to slaughter and package themselves for in-state sales but anyone operating under one of those exemptions won't be able to grow that business large enough to self-finance constructing their own USDA-monitored facility.
      - reactordev 10mo ago
        Yup, this is called a ladder pull. A business moat. You legally are able but the economics make it so that you physically can’t. Not unless you have outside investment.
tw04 10mo ago
I wonder if at some point before large corporations finish buying up the last of the family farms in America, if rural America will figure out Trump and his maga republicans were never their friends.
- dh2022 10mo ago
  Don't you worry, deposed farmers (those farmers squeezed between their mega-size suppliers and mega-size customers who had to sell their farms) voted for Trump last year.
- kayodelycaon 10mo ago
  I don’t think it would. Humans really like to blame other people for things they inflict on themselves. This is less painful than learning self-awareness. The current Republican Party blatantly preys on this weakness and gives people an enemy to hate so they can keep fleecing them. This is different than the Democrats, who can’t get their shit together and have a common goal.
jadenPete 10mo ago
This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?
- ggm 10mo ago
  1. Farmers vote. And, Farmers live in states where the value-per-vote is high under both state-vote balancing, and gerrymander. Farming is politically useful. 2. Food is part of national security. It's sensible to keep the sector working. 3. Consumers hate variability in food pricing. So, general sentiment at the shop is not in favour of a strong linkage of cost of production to price, and under imports, there's almost always a source of cheaper product, at the socialised cost of losing domestic food security: Buy the cheese from Brazil, along with the beef, and let them buy soy beans from China and Australia to make the beef fatter. -And then, you can sell food for peanuts (sorry) but you won't like the longer term political consequences, if you do this. See 1) and 2).
  - TimorousBestie 10mo ago
    I agree with you that the food supply chain is vital to (any country’s) national security, but I don’t think anyone with any real power takes this seriously.
  - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
    America has a surplus of soy beans, it’s China that needs to import from us or Brazil. The mess farmers are in now is that China has decided Brazil is a better source for them given the current trade war going on. China actually imports a lot of food from us, they seem to be the biggest consumer of chicken and pork feet, for example, which we don’t seem to have much use for. The current subsidies are because that export trade, which farmers have depended on and invested in, has basically disappeared now.
- deleted 10mo ago
ggm 10mo ago
Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important. It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy. It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live) So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.
- nine_zeros 10mo ago
  [dead]
- tananaev 10mo ago
  I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened. Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.
  - keithnz 10mo ago
    Having been in the NZ ag tech industry for the last 25+ years, US subsidies and tarrifs drove a lot of innovation in NZ (also Europe) and then US manufacturers in the spaces I've been in have pretty much collapsed when faced with better tech as farmers switched to using our ( or the European) tech.
    - bix6 10mo ago
      Curious what sort of tech? Like better tractors and such?
      - greycol 10mo ago
        A lot of meat cutting (and packaging) robotics and dairy automation are the flashy ones. Softer tech like crop, orchard management and cultivar creation as well as stock breeding/selection or logistics all of which came a long way. The development of uses for byproducts i.e. chemical refineries to change milk into something like protein or milk powder and use the secondary products from those processes to produce alcohols or fertilizer.
8note 10mo ago
would this actually be enough such that farmers have to sell their land and new small family farmers cam get started? or only a new set of bankruptcies and the same farmers stay on? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJlcg%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJ... was very illuminating
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Small farmers are not good policy despite the romance. A large farmer can afford soil investments that small ones cannot
- garrickvanburen 10mo ago
  It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else. Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines. Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.
  - kiba 10mo ago
    I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming. With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands. Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.
  - mlrtime 10mo ago
    It really depends on the farm, unlikely it will be used for anything else. 90% likely what would happen is an adjacent farmer would buy the land. You want all your land to be near each other, like defragementing a hard drive ;)
insane_dreamer 10mo ago
Quite surprised there wasn't mention of the Trump tariffs on China causing the collapse of China imports of US soybeans, which by the way, has persisted even though the original tariffs were reduced, causing lasting damage to farmers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-purchased-no-us-soybeans-an-unprecented-sixth-straight-month/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-pur...
- lateforwork 10mo ago
  Almost 78% of farmers voted for Trump [1]. These are the guys that got Trump elected. Polls show that support for President Trump among farmers remains high, hovering around 50-60%. That means these are the guys that are keeping Trump in power. When support among farmers drops to 20% level GOP legislators will feel emboldened to remove Trump from power. [1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210000721.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjedvwed1xgo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjedvwed1xgo
  - insane_dreamer 10mo ago
    It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests. I mean, name one thing that Trump has done to help farmers more than he hurt them with the tariffs? (Subsidies they already had, regardless of the party in power.) What are they getting in return for their vote? The safety of knowing that trans athletes are banned and some Guatemalans in far away "liberal" cities have been "gotten rid of"? None of those benefit them in any way. I still can't quite understand.
    - lateforwork 10mo ago
      GOP has long pursued a strategy of getting rural whites to vote against their self interest. This is why they play up cultural issues such as trans people using women's bathrooms and such other topics that uneducated people can readily grasp.
jwcooper 10mo ago
The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers. They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices. They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government. When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to. The whole system is broken from top to bottom.
- smallmancontrov 10mo ago
  Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork! He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
  - vkou 10mo ago
    > It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue. Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.
    - smallmancontrov 10mo ago
      Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em! Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.
deadbabe 10mo ago
I watched a YouTube video that made me really worried about this, hopefully there are smart people on here that can see a bigger picture.
b112 10mo ago
Canada has a thing called "Supply Management". It means that for some agricultural industries, we limit how many people can produce, for example, milk. This restriction keeps the price of milk stable, and high enough that farmers can make a profit. It may seem strange to some, but the goal is to ensure that we don't have to bail out our farmers. The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out. Canadians watch crazy things like for example the US Federal government buying millions and millions of gallons of milk, making cheese, and storing it for decades. All to reduce supply/create demand, and keep the price artificially high. I suppose one bonus is the US government gives some of this cheese to the poor. The other crazy part is the US federal government has repeatedly bought dairy farms out, to reduce supply. Literally bought entire farms, and closed them down. Canada wants a stable supply of milk. We don't want to rely upon a foreign power for basic food-stuffs. And we don't want to spend untold billions. Thus, supply management. Meanwhile, the US runs around saying we're crazy commies because we have price and supply control, says free market is perfect, then spends endless billions over decades to pretend the market works. Oh and also, the US screams about how our market isn't "open", how we unfairly manipulate the market, then... wants to inject super cheap, underpriced milk, all of the result of US federal tax dollars spending billions. Finally, it is illegal to use growth hormones in Canada on cattle. Not so in the US. With the excess supply issues in dairy in the US, maybe the US should do the same?
- newsclues 10mo ago
  Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices. The supply management system is not perfect.
  - b112 10mo ago
    You can't produce an exact amount of food. It isn't an assembly line, it's farming, it's biological. You need to aim for excess, to ensure enough is produced during drought, animal sickness, and other variability. What Canada does is ensure there is excess, but not crazy amounts. It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers. What you call "high food price" we call "farmers not going bankrupt". And while nothing is perfect, supply management is far better than the alternatives.
RobLach 10mo ago
Sarah Taber for the lowdown all things US Farming https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber
bluGill 10mo ago
It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up. i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)
- d--b 10mo ago
  > overall operating expenses remain well above pre-2021 levels. Rising costs since 2020 have been driven primarily by sharp increases in interest expenses (+71%), fertilizer (+37%), fuel and oil (+32%), labor (+47%), chemicals (+25%) and maintenance (+27%), alongside notable gains in seed (+18%) and marketing costs (+18%) These numbers are huge though. I think it is fair to say that this time it may be different.
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    Looks like inflation to me - we all pay the same interest and everything else has been going up.
jmyeet 10mo ago
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. Any handouts for farmers go straight into the coffers of multinationals to pay for farm equipment, support for the locked down farm equipment, the patented seeds, the pesticides for the patented seeds and so on. The entire subsdization model is a profit opportunity for agricultural companies. And what do those companies wnat to do? Buy up the farms and run them themselves for more profit. Because they don't have to charge the same amount to their own farms of course. It's also why the wealthy and big companies like illegal immigration. It's an endless supply of underpaid workers who can be exploited for even more profits. Document these people and everybody's wages go up. The only country I can think of that is really effectively managing its agriculture and food supply is of course China. China had some food shortages in the late 20th century and a result food security became a primary concern of the CCP. China has to feed 20% of the world's population and decided that food need to be plentiful and affordable. There were a seris of agricultural reforms through the 1970s to 1990s and then China used its increasing wealth to pay farmers when they had to and subsidize food when they had to to manage the supply. It's managed to the highest levels of China's government [1]. Here we have rent-seeking corporations and billionaires (eg the Resnicks [2]) where subsidies are just a wealth transfer to the already wealthy. food prices are out of control. But nobody cares because the profits have to keep going up. [1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-challenges-and-emerging-policy-responses https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-chall... [2]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-californias-water-supply/ https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  The US also took food security seriously after WW2. Now it's all devolved into HFCS.
  - b3lvedere 10mo ago
    Or they exported the good food, because they could get a better price for it. When i want real quality food for a good price in my own country, i have to go to another country to actually get it. Again, i can't condemn them for trying to make more profit, but somewhere in the line it gets pretty weird and annoying.
exabrial 10mo ago
Oddly enough the way to help is to removing the subsidies. Exploiting famers, using them as a middleman to the American taxpayer, is extremely lucrative.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  Some subsidies are useful. Some aren't. The trick is to stop the ones that aren't helping without collapsing our food supply.
  - exabrial 10mo ago
    Of course, I'm sure a temporary one might be useful once a decade or century. My point is this exactly mirrors the situation in health insurance, university degree prices, and many other industries we permanent subsidize. Companies create machines to use people to access the nearly unlimited pool of money available.
csours 10mo ago
Of all the guns that rural Americans love, the humble foot-gun is the most beloved. --- Someone else can argue the morality, ethics, economics, and politics of it all, but VERY simply, US Federal Government Agencies are machines for redistributing wealth from cities to rural areas. Rural America voted quite heavily to stop those subsidies. That's what efficiency means. --- Maturity means suspending judgement and listening to people you disagree with, but I feel that's very out of style these days.
- bruce511 10mo ago
  I agree. Personally I don't understand the love that agriculture shows to the Republican party, but hey you get what you vote for. It seems like this whole year has been implementing policy after policy that screws over agriculture. USAid (big purchaser) gone. 40 billion sent to Argentina. Antagonize Canadians (Canadians !!) so they boycott American produce. Tarif China so they'll reciprocate on soy beans. Deport farm workers. Tarif imports of steel so machine costs go up. Tarif fertilizer so production costs go up. Tarif everything else to reduce consumer spending power. Despite all this farmers will continue to vote republican this year, and in future years. I presume they have reasons, but I confess they are hard to understand.
  - jiggawatts 10mo ago
    I've been curious about this myself, and I listened to some pro-Trump people who seem otherwise intelligent that tried to explain this effect. One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent. They can't rely on government services as much as city folk, because everything and everyone is potentially an hour's drive away. They don't see the effect of their taxes being spent, because their local roads are dirt roads, there's no traffic lights, no police cars[1] or ambulances zipping by on the regular, etc... Conversely, they do get frustrated by the likes of the EPA turning up -- invariably city folk with suits and dress shoes -- telling them what to do. "You can't burn this" or "You can't dump that!". More commonly "you can't cut down trees on your land that you thought were your property". Their perception of government is that it violates their God-given rights regularly and gives little in return. The further the seat of power, the worse their opinion of it. Local councils they might tolerate, state governments they view with suspicion, and the federal government may as well be on another planet. Hence, their votes are easily swayed by the "reduce federal government" rhetoric. We all know this is as an obvious falsehood: Trump grew the size of the federal government with his Big Beautiful Bill! So did every Republican government before him for quite a while now! That doesn't matter. Propaganda works. The message resonates. The voters will vote against their own interests over and over and over if they keep hearing something that resonates with what they feel. PS: A great example of this are the thousands of unemployed people that lost their coal mining jobs. Trump lied through his teeth and told them they would get their mining jobs back. Hillary told them they could be retrained as tech support or whatever. They. Did. Not. Like. That. They wanted their jobs back! So they voted for Trump, who had zero chance of returning them to employment because they had been replaced by automation and larger, more powerful mining machines. Their jobs were gone permanently, so they doubled down by voting against the person who promised to pull them out of that hole. Sadly, this is a recurring theme in politics throughout the world. [1] As an example, this is why they're mostly pro-gun! They know viscerally that if someone broke into their property, they'd have to defend themselves because the local police can't get there in time to save them.perception.
nickpsecurity 10mo ago
They described a lot of data. Then, toward the end, they say: "These loss estimates reflect national averages; actual costs of production and returns vary by region, management decisions and ownership structure. For example, producers who own their farmland may face lower total costs by avoiding cash rental expenses, resulting in higher returns." So, can we trust this to say what it appears to be saying? Or might it be meaningless like many broad averages, and we should use more specific data that includes supplier behaviors?
viburnum 10mo ago
Strangely no mention of the climate crisis.
- mlrtime 10mo ago
  Thankfully (smug response) Not every topic needs to discuss every tangent problem.
  - viburnum 10mo ago
    Climate is obviously relevant to agricultural production.
willvarfar 10mo ago
This video is very liberal but does a good job of explaining which companies and industries pay for breaks and which don't. And uses soy bean farmers as a prominent example of a group who haven't been giving Trump bribes https://youtu.be/RPzcGeiNYvk?si=bfy_5KEo_ZUxOBHu https://youtu.be/RPzcGeiNYvk?si=bfy_5KEo_ZUxOBHu
Animats 10mo ago
Much of this is an antitrust problem. The inputs to farming, especially seeds, fertilizer and machinery, are controlled by monopolies and near-monopolies. There have been too many mergers. On the sell side, there's monopsony or near-monopsony, with very few big buyers.[1] Farmers are caught in the middle, with little pricing power on either side. There's not much question about this. There are antitrust cases, but with weak penalties and weak enforcement. [1] https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-big-ags-monopsony-problem-how-market-dominance-harms-u-s-workers-and-consumers/ https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-big-ags-monopso...
- cik 10mo ago
  No, much of this is a political issue. America wants food standards that are different from many trading partners; fair enough. But it makes it impossible to export many farm goods as a result. This is outside of the current political climate, and has been going on for ages. It's just coming it a head now.
  - unglaublich 10mo ago
    People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives. If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds.
    - bestouff 10mo ago
      Looks like the healthcare system.
      - chanux 10mo ago
        Looks like a pipeline.
    - dathinab 10mo ago
pbkompasz 10mo ago
Good. Actions have consequences it seems
jdasdf 10mo ago
Because* This is a result of subsidies distorting market prices and encouraging malinvestment.
jongjong 10mo ago
It's so obvious why. Money is created by governments and banks and it goes right back to them. Money doesn't stay in the system for too long because it's taxed each time it hops between people/companies. If you assume a 30% tax each time a dollar moves from one person to another, after just 6 hops, almost 90% of that dollar is gone... So people who are just 6 steps removed from the money printers live in a monetary environment where a dollar is 10 times rarer! That's not even factoring in inflationary Cantillon effects... It's Cantillon effects on crack... Most independent farmers live in remote areas, far from money printers; they exist in a scarce monetary environment. It's hard to compete when your big corporate competitors exist in an environment where money is more abundant.
lordgrenville 10mo ago
Mildly surprised that this domain belongs to the Farm Bureau. Maybe they should sell it to Meta and donate the proceeds to the money-losing farms...
b3ing 10mo ago
JD Vance’s acretrader app is making out like bandits selling that farmland they are buying for cheap. This is on purpose
silexia 10mo ago
Farmer here. Farmers in the USA have to pay far higher wages than other countries due to labor protection laws, and have to pay far higher equipment and chemical costs than other countries due to environmental laws. We need either massive subsidies to make up for the effect of these laws, or massive tariffs to even the playing field with countries using slave labor and toxic lakes.
anthem2025 10mo ago
[dead]
ta9000 10mo ago
As an American, farmers here fucked around and found out. Last time Trump and Congress bailed them out in the last “trade war”, didn’t happen this time. Screw ‘em.
fuzzer371 10mo ago
Farming. The only industry where you can make a loss year after year, and for some reason people keep doing it.

284 points by toomuchtodo 10mo ago

https://www.fb.org/news-release/agricultural-groups-sound-alarm-about-farmers-future https://www.fb.org/news-release/agricultural-groups-sound-al...

estearum 10mo ago

[flagged]

Drupon 10mo ago
This isn't reddit.

reactordev 10mo ago

There’s only two meat packers… two. Where are the cattle farmers to go? It’s like this across the industry thanks to monopolies like ConAgra, Tyson’s, etc.

autoexec 10mo ago
Breaking up monopolies and giving farm workers strong unions would go a long way to improving the situation.
- tstrimple 10mo ago
  You'll never guess which group is consistently against unions!
mlrtime 10mo ago
There are many many meat packers, or you just mean two big ones?
- reactordev 10mo ago
  “The U.S. meatpacking industry is dominated by the "Big Four"—Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—which control 80-85% of the beef market and significant portions of poultry and pork”
  - tbyehl 10mo ago
    It's so much worse for poultry. My state and the bordering states represent more than half of US production and there's exactly one USDA facility available to independent producers. They're quite small and the cost approaches today's retail price for a whole Tyson chicken. There are USDA exemptions for tiny producers (up to 20K/yr vs 150K+ for a single modern broiler house) to slaughter and package themselves for in-state sales but anyone operating under one of those exemptions won't be able to grow that business large enough to self-finance constructing their own USDA-monitored facility.
    - reactordev 10mo ago
      Yup, this is called a ladder pull. A business moat. You legally are able but the economics make it so that you physically can’t. Not unless you have outside investment.

tw04 10mo ago

I wonder if at some point before large corporations finish buying up the last of the family farms in America, if rural America will figure out Trump and his maga republicans were never their friends.

dh2022 10mo ago
Don't you worry, deposed farmers (those farmers squeezed between their mega-size suppliers and mega-size customers who had to sell their farms) voted for Trump last year.
kayodelycaon 10mo ago
I don’t think it would. Humans really like to blame other people for things they inflict on themselves. This is less painful than learning self-awareness. The current Republican Party blatantly preys on this weakness and gives people an enemy to hate so they can keep fleecing them. This is different than the Democrats, who can’t get their shit together and have a common goal.

jadenPete 10mo ago

This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?

ggm 10mo ago
1. Farmers vote. And, Farmers live in states where the value-per-vote is high under both state-vote balancing, and gerrymander. Farming is politically useful. 2. Food is part of national security. It's sensible to keep the sector working. 3. Consumers hate variability in food pricing. So, general sentiment at the shop is not in favour of a strong linkage of cost of production to price, and under imports, there's almost always a source of cheaper product, at the socialised cost of losing domestic food security: Buy the cheese from Brazil, along with the beef, and let them buy soy beans from China and Australia to make the beef fatter. -And then, you can sell food for peanuts (sorry) but you won't like the longer term political consequences, if you do this. See 1) and 2).
- TimorousBestie 10mo ago
  I agree with you that the food supply chain is vital to (any country’s) national security, but I don’t think anyone with any real power takes this seriously.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
  America has a surplus of soy beans, it’s China that needs to import from us or Brazil. The mess farmers are in now is that China has decided Brazil is a better source for them given the current trade war going on. China actually imports a lot of food from us, they seem to be the biggest consumer of chicken and pork feet, for example, which we don’t seem to have much use for. The current subsidies are because that export trade, which farmers have depended on and invested in, has basically disappeared now.
deleted 10mo ago

ggm 10mo ago

Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important. It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy. It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live) So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.

nine_zeros 10mo ago
[dead]
tananaev 10mo ago
I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened. Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.
- keithnz 10mo ago
  Having been in the NZ ag tech industry for the last 25+ years, US subsidies and tarrifs drove a lot of innovation in NZ (also Europe) and then US manufacturers in the spaces I've been in have pretty much collapsed when faced with better tech as farmers switched to using our ( or the European) tech.
  - bix6 10mo ago
    Curious what sort of tech? Like better tractors and such?
    - greycol 10mo ago
      A lot of meat cutting (and packaging) robotics and dairy automation are the flashy ones. Softer tech like crop, orchard management and cultivar creation as well as stock breeding/selection or logistics all of which came a long way. The development of uses for byproducts i.e. chemical refineries to change milk into something like protein or milk powder and use the secondary products from those processes to produce alcohols or fertilizer.

8note 10mo ago

would this actually be enough such that farmers have to sell their land and new small family farmers cam get started? or only a new set of bankruptcies and the same farmers stay on? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJlcg%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJ... was very illuminating

bluGill 10mo ago
Small farmers are not good policy despite the romance. A large farmer can afford soil investments that small ones cannot
garrickvanburen 10mo ago
It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else. Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines. Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.
- kiba 10mo ago
  I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming. With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands. Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.
- mlrtime 10mo ago
  It really depends on the farm, unlikely it will be used for anything else. 90% likely what would happen is an adjacent farmer would buy the land. You want all your land to be near each other, like defragementing a hard drive ;)

insane_dreamer 10mo ago

Quite surprised there wasn't mention of the Trump tariffs on China causing the collapse of China imports of US soybeans, which by the way, has persisted even though the original tariffs were reduced, causing lasting damage to farmers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-purchased-no-us-soybeans-an-unprecented-sixth-straight-month/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-pur...

lateforwork 10mo ago
Almost 78% of farmers voted for Trump [1]. These are the guys that got Trump elected. Polls show that support for President Trump among farmers remains high, hovering around 50-60%. That means these are the guys that are keeping Trump in power. When support among farmers drops to 20% level GOP legislators will feel emboldened to remove Trump from power. [1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210000721.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjedvwed1xgo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjedvwed1xgo
- insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests. I mean, name one thing that Trump has done to help farmers more than he hurt them with the tariffs? (Subsidies they already had, regardless of the party in power.) What are they getting in return for their vote? The safety of knowing that trans athletes are banned and some Guatemalans in far away "liberal" cities have been "gotten rid of"? None of those benefit them in any way. I still can't quite understand.
  - lateforwork 10mo ago
    GOP has long pursued a strategy of getting rural whites to vote against their self interest. This is why they play up cultural issues such as trans people using women's bathrooms and such other topics that uneducated people can readily grasp.

jwcooper 10mo ago

The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers. They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices. They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government. When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to. The whole system is broken from top to bottom.

smallmancontrov 10mo ago
Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork! He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
- vkou 10mo ago
  > It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue. Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.
  - smallmancontrov 10mo ago
    Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em! Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.

deadbabe 10mo ago

I watched a YouTube video that made me really worried about this, hopefully there are smart people on here that can see a bigger picture.

b112 10mo ago

Canada has a thing called "Supply Management". It means that for some agricultural industries, we limit how many people can produce, for example, milk. This restriction keeps the price of milk stable, and high enough that farmers can make a profit. It may seem strange to some, but the goal is to ensure that we don't have to bail out our farmers. The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out. Canadians watch crazy things like for example the US Federal government buying millions and millions of gallons of milk, making cheese, and storing it for decades. All to reduce supply/create demand, and keep the price artificially high. I suppose one bonus is the US government gives some of this cheese to the poor. The other crazy part is the US federal government has repeatedly bought dairy farms out, to reduce supply. Literally bought entire farms, and closed them down. Canada wants a stable supply of milk. We don't want to rely upon a foreign power for basic food-stuffs. And we don't want to spend untold billions. Thus, supply management. Meanwhile, the US runs around saying we're crazy commies because we have price and supply control, says free market is perfect, then spends endless billions over decades to pretend the market works. Oh and also, the US screams about how our market isn't "open", how we unfairly manipulate the market, then... wants to inject super cheap, underpriced milk, all of the result of US federal tax dollars spending billions. Finally, it is illegal to use growth hormones in Canada on cattle. Not so in the US. With the excess supply issues in dairy in the US, maybe the US should do the same?

newsclues 10mo ago
Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices. The supply management system is not perfect.
- b112 10mo ago
  You can't produce an exact amount of food. It isn't an assembly line, it's farming, it's biological. You need to aim for excess, to ensure enough is produced during drought, animal sickness, and other variability. What Canada does is ensure there is excess, but not crazy amounts. It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers. What you call "high food price" we call "farmers not going bankrupt". And while nothing is perfect, supply management is far better than the alternatives.

RobLach 10mo ago

Sarah Taber for the lowdown all things US Farming https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber

bluGill 10mo ago

It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up. i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)

d--b 10mo ago
> overall operating expenses remain well above pre-2021 levels. Rising costs since 2020 have been driven primarily by sharp increases in interest expenses (+71%), fertilizer (+37%), fuel and oil (+32%), labor (+47%), chemicals (+25%) and maintenance (+27%), alongside notable gains in seed (+18%) and marketing costs (+18%) These numbers are huge though. I think it is fair to say that this time it may be different.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Looks like inflation to me - we all pay the same interest and everything else has been going up.

jmyeet 10mo ago

Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. Any handouts for farmers go straight into the coffers of multinationals to pay for farm equipment, support for the locked down farm equipment, the patented seeds, the pesticides for the patented seeds and so on. The entire subsdization model is a profit opportunity for agricultural companies. And what do those companies wnat to do? Buy up the farms and run them themselves for more profit. Because they don't have to charge the same amount to their own farms of course. It's also why the wealthy and big companies like illegal immigration. It's an endless supply of underpaid workers who can be exploited for even more profits. Document these people and everybody's wages go up. The only country I can think of that is really effectively managing its agriculture and food supply is of course China. China had some food shortages in the late 20th century and a result food security became a primary concern of the CCP. China has to feed 20% of the world's population and decided that food need to be plentiful and affordable. There were a seris of agricultural reforms through the 1970s to 1990s and then China used its increasing wealth to pay farmers when they had to and subsidize food when they had to to manage the supply. It's managed to the highest levels of China's government [1]. Here we have rent-seeking corporations and billionaires (eg the Resnicks [2]) where subsidies are just a wealth transfer to the already wealthy. food prices are out of control. But nobody cares because the profits have to keep going up. [1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-challenges-and-emerging-policy-responses https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-chall... [2]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-californias-water-supply/ https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...

actionfromafar 10mo ago
The US also took food security seriously after WW2. Now it's all devolved into HFCS.
- b3lvedere 10mo ago
  Or they exported the good food, because they could get a better price for it. When i want real quality food for a good price in my own country, i have to go to another country to actually get it. Again, i can't condemn them for trying to make more profit, but somewhere in the line it gets pretty weird and annoying.

exabrial 10mo ago

Oddly enough the way to help is to removing the subsidies. Exploiting famers, using them as a middleman to the American taxpayer, is extremely lucrative.

autoexec 10mo ago
Some subsidies are useful. Some aren't. The trick is to stop the ones that aren't helping without collapsing our food supply.
- exabrial 10mo ago
  Of course, I'm sure a temporary one might be useful once a decade or century. My point is this exactly mirrors the situation in health insurance, university degree prices, and many other industries we permanent subsidize. Companies create machines to use people to access the nearly unlimited pool of money available.

csours 10mo ago

Of all the guns that rural Americans love, the humble foot-gun is the most beloved. --- Someone else can argue the morality, ethics, economics, and politics of it all, but VERY simply, US Federal Government Agencies are machines for redistributing wealth from cities to rural areas. Rural America voted quite heavily to stop those subsidies. That's what efficiency means. --- Maturity means suspending judgement and listening to people you disagree with, but I feel that's very out of style these days.

bruce511 10mo ago
I agree. Personally I don't understand the love that agriculture shows to the Republican party, but hey you get what you vote for. It seems like this whole year has been implementing policy after policy that screws over agriculture. USAid (big purchaser) gone. 40 billion sent to Argentina. Antagonize Canadians (Canadians !!) so they boycott American produce. Tarif China so they'll reciprocate on soy beans. Deport farm workers. Tarif imports of steel so machine costs go up. Tarif fertilizer so production costs go up. Tarif everything else to reduce consumer spending power. Despite all this farmers will continue to vote republican this year, and in future years. I presume they have reasons, but I confess they are hard to understand.
- jiggawatts 10mo ago
  I've been curious about this myself, and I listened to some pro-Trump people who seem otherwise intelligent that tried to explain this effect. One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent. They can't rely on government services as much as city folk, because everything and everyone is potentially an hour's drive away. They don't see the effect of their taxes being spent, because their local roads are dirt roads, there's no traffic lights, no police cars[1] or ambulances zipping by on the regular, etc... Conversely, they do get frustrated by the likes of the EPA turning up -- invariably city folk with suits and dress shoes -- telling them what to do. "You can't burn this" or "You can't dump that!". More commonly "you can't cut down trees on your land that you thought were your property". Their perception of government is that it violates their God-given rights regularly and gives little in return. The further the seat of power, the worse their opinion of it. Local councils they might tolerate, state governments they view with suspicion, and the federal government may as well be on another planet. Hence, their votes are easily swayed by the "reduce federal government" rhetoric. We all know this is as an obvious falsehood: Trump grew the size of the federal government with his Big Beautiful Bill! So did every Republican government before him for quite a while now! That doesn't matter. Propaganda works. The message resonates. The voters will vote against their own interests over and over and over if they keep hearing something that resonates with what they feel. PS: A great example of this are the thousands of unemployed people that lost their coal mining jobs. Trump lied through his teeth and told them they would get their mining jobs back. Hillary told them they could be retrained as tech support or whatever. They. Did. Not. Like. That. They wanted their jobs back! So they voted for Trump, who had zero chance of returning them to employment because they had been replaced by automation and larger, more powerful mining machines. Their jobs were gone permanently, so they doubled down by voting against the person who promised to pull them out of that hole. Sadly, this is a recurring theme in politics throughout the world. [1] As an example, this is why they're mostly pro-gun! They know viscerally that if someone broke into their property, they'd have to defend themselves because the local police can't get there in time to save them.perception.

nickpsecurity 10mo ago

They described a lot of data. Then, toward the end, they say: "These loss estimates reflect national averages; actual costs of production and returns vary by region, management decisions and ownership structure. For example, producers who own their farmland may face lower total costs by avoiding cash rental expenses, resulting in higher returns." So, can we trust this to say what it appears to be saying? Or might it be meaningless like many broad averages, and we should use more specific data that includes supplier behaviors?

viburnum 10mo ago

Strangely no mention of the climate crisis.

mlrtime 10mo ago
Thankfully (smug response) Not every topic needs to discuss every tangent problem.
- viburnum 10mo ago
  Climate is obviously relevant to agricultural production.

willvarfar 10mo ago

This video is very liberal but does a good job of explaining which companies and industries pay for breaks and which don't. And uses soy bean farmers as a prominent example of a group who haven't been giving Trump bribes https://youtu.be/RPzcGeiNYvk?si=bfy_5KEo_ZUxOBHu https://youtu.be/RPzcGeiNYvk?si=bfy_5KEo_ZUxOBHu

Animats 10mo ago

Much of this is an antitrust problem. The inputs to farming, especially seeds, fertilizer and machinery, are controlled by monopolies and near-monopolies. There have been too many mergers. On the sell side, there's monopsony or near-monopsony, with very few big buyers.[1] Farmers are caught in the middle, with little pricing power on either side. There's not much question about this. There are antitrust cases, but with weak penalties and weak enforcement. [1] https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-big-ags-monopsony-problem-how-market-dominance-harms-u-s-workers-and-consumers/ https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-big-ags-monopso...

cik 10mo ago
No, much of this is a political issue. America wants food standards that are different from many trading partners; fair enough. But it makes it impossible to export many farm goods as a result. This is outside of the current political climate, and has been going on for ages. It's just coming it a head now.
- unglaublich 10mo ago
  People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives. If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds.
  - bestouff 10mo ago
    Looks like the healthcare system.
    - chanux 10mo ago
      Looks like a pipeline.
  - dathinab 10mo ago

pbkompasz 10mo ago

Good. Actions have consequences it seems

jdasdf 10mo ago

Because* This is a result of subsidies distorting market prices and encouraging malinvestment.

jongjong 10mo ago

It's so obvious why. Money is created by governments and banks and it goes right back to them. Money doesn't stay in the system for too long because it's taxed each time it hops between people/companies. If you assume a 30% tax each time a dollar moves from one person to another, after just 6 hops, almost 90% of that dollar is gone... So people who are just 6 steps removed from the money printers live in a monetary environment where a dollar is 10 times rarer! That's not even factoring in inflationary Cantillon effects... It's Cantillon effects on crack... Most independent farmers live in remote areas, far from money printers; they exist in a scarce monetary environment. It's hard to compete when your big corporate competitors exist in an environment where money is more abundant.

lordgrenville 10mo ago

Mildly surprised that this domain belongs to the Farm Bureau. Maybe they should sell it to Meta and donate the proceeds to the money-losing farms...

b3ing 10mo ago

JD Vance’s acretrader app is making out like bandits selling that farmland they are buying for cheap. This is on purpose

silexia 10mo ago

Farmer here. Farmers in the USA have to pay far higher wages than other countries due to labor protection laws, and have to pay far higher equipment and chemical costs than other countries due to environmental laws. We need either massive subsidies to make up for the effect of these laws, or massive tariffs to even the playing field with countries using slave labor and toxic lakes.

anthem2025 10mo ago

[dead]

ta9000 10mo ago

As an American, farmers here fucked around and found out. Last time Trump and Congress bailed them out in the last “trade war”, didn’t happen this time. Screw ‘em.

fuzzer371 10mo ago

Farming. The only industry where you can make a loss year after year, and for some reason people keep doing it.