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.
> I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well
As a small commodity farmer, I don't see why it can't work well. Cash crop farming is quite well suited to small operations as far as I am concerned. The actual hard place to be is the mid-sized farmer trying to manage boatloads of debt.
The current crop price situation is not ideal, but we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years. Save during the good times to weather the bad is farming 101. I suspect, given how much equipment prices jumped in the last few years, that some of these guys thought they could get away with going out and buying a bunch of new toys and that's what really has gotten them into trouble.
Yeah, there's this whole YouTube genre of fairly unassuming farms showing off millions of dollars in the latest and greatest John Deere equipment and coming up with rationalizations about how it's going to pay for itself very soon.
But the bottom line is that there are fat years and lean years in agriculture, but if it gets really bad for a sufficient number of farmers, the government bails you out because the alternative - no food - is recognized as worse.
> we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years
Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers? From TFA:
> This is the worst agriculture economy of my lifetime over at least the past three years
> Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers?
I honestly have no idea. Three years ago in particular is when the perfect storm lead to historically high commodity prices. If that's what they consider the worst time in agriculture history, I have no understanding of where they are coming from. The problem right now is that the input costs are still trying to act as if it is still three years ago, which is a problem, but the cure for high prices is high prices. I see no reason to think that will last.
As suggested before, it is likely that they are overleveraged and the loss of profitability coupled with higher interest rates is what is killing them. That's the trouble with trying to be a mid-sized player.
Because no farmer ever will tell you he had a good year. He should have sold a month earlier than he did, or held on a week longer. Just the way it is, I guess.
In my business I see their books. Good years and bad years. Some things are more volatile - dairy can swing between losses and significant profits. Layers are pretty steady if you are on a contract, as long as you don't get the avian flu. Produce farmers rarely have a loss year, but their high income years are generally not as high as crop farmers, who sometimes do show a significant annual loss. More risk = more reward.
The last few years have been pretty good overall, for my clients.
2000 acres! That’s only worth $30+ million up here in the corn belt.
> In 2024, there were over 100 sales of excellent productivity farmland in Region 6. The sale price per acre ranged from $11,000 to $22,508, with an average value of $17,210 per acre.
> That’s only worth $30+ million up here in the corn belt.
And more like $60 million (USD; $80 million CAD) in the Canadian corn belt, which is not even nearly as productive. It is astonishing how cheap US farmland is.
The comments/narrative in TFA don't line up with FRED. 2022 was like 3x more profitable overall compared to 2016, and 2023 wasn't much worse. It's definitely coming back down.
From TFA though, 2400 is like 2x-2.5x median farm size. That's not a small farm size. It's not a massive corpo farm, but it's not a small farm. So the segment quoted in that article might be under some pretty specific pressures (other commenters alluded to - they may have bought some very pricey equipment during good years - an actually small farm will get by on shittier equipment or just rent for a brief harvest)
Lots of farmers in my area owning equipment with fresh paint (well, plastic panels these days) that can't make land payments, or at least complaining about it. The ROI on new equipment is poor and when things were booming the farmers lost discipline and the manufacturers were happy to add features and cost - fun for everyone! Chickens are coming home to roost now for a lot of folks and some of them are sharpening their pencils and some of them are in denial - in my opinion.
I recognize that harvest windows are restricted, but a coop of local farmers having shared ownership in the bigger toys seems like it might make some economic sense.
You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?
There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? Well, that’s the goal, to just have a company to have a bigger person buy you up and then you go away with the money and everyone else suffers.
There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
> You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?
I'm just not sure how else you go from some of the most profitable years in agriculture history to bankruptcy in the span of a year or two. Vendor prices have not yet come back down in line with reality, nobody is going to question that, but, as they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. These temporary aberrations are par for the course. For what reason is there to believe that this time is different?
> There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech.
Yes, Nvidia looks quite similar in a lot of ways. But the pick and shovel makers have always been best positioned to take advantage of gold rushes. That isn't unusual.
> And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up?
I'm not really sure how this applies in any way, but especially because you don't really have to compete for customers in commodities. A commodity implies that you have automatic customers. It is not like you have to try and convince users to use your product over Google's.
> There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
I don't doubt it, but the main person quoted in the article is sitting on like $20 million to $30 million of cultivated land and $??? of additional land (Could be hundreds of thousands, could be another 8 figures).
To the extent there is a separation of wealth problem, it's not at all clear where that person is in the separation. Maybe they debt financed the whole thing plus equipment under ZIRP with a non-fixed interest loan, and are now staring down the barrel of $1M-$2M annual interest payments, with very little capital of their own. Maybe they have a total net worth of $10M+ even if they had to sell, and are actually fine if they just quit the game right now. I dunno.
> The difference being that viruses exist, and the scenario in question with food is ridiculous nonsense.
Its not, famines are a real thing and many people die from them. They only way money can prevent famines is by making farmers grow more food last year.
So its just as important to pay farmers with government money to keep growing food as it is to pay hospitals to keep treating people.
Sometimes "victims" have been looking for some consequences for quite a while. Poke a bear long enough to be hurt, don't be surprised people blame you, "the victim".
An important point that’s missed in this is that these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security. So regardless of what an analogous business in another sector may choose to do, we really want small farms to be sustainable all over the country.
> these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security
Hmm, that's only true if the kinds of crops those small farms are regularly growing are the kinds we'd want to have already in the ground as an unexpected "food security" crisis occurs. In other words, durable staples with long shelf-lives, as opposed to cash-crops for export, quick-spoiling luxuries, etc.
Are there any stats that might confirm/disprove that? Because if most those small farms are geared to pistachios or asparagus or hemp, then they aren't really serving as a national safety net.
What is the basis for the idea that small farms are vital for food security? Farms, sure. Small farms? We need low-productivity small farms for food security?
I'm no expert in the field, but if asked, I would prefer thousands of small farms protecting our food security rather than a handful of companies too big to fail.
When you have more diversity, I imagine you would get more resilience, more competition, and market forces work properly.
I don't get the small businesses fetishism. Large companies are efficient, resilient, more likely to follow the letter of the law, and more scalably prosecutable if they don't.
The US is currently experiencing a fairly extreme security threat across multiple industries due dependency on a single provider. Boeing and Intel jump to mind, for example.
If that's your answer then you're vastly underestimating how much farmland there is. We have 1.6 million small farms, averaging a couple hundred acres. Large farms usually have a couple thousand acres.
If every farm in the US was around 3000 acres, we would still have a quarter million farms. Even 100k acre mega farms would leave us with 8000+ farms.
"“Seed, chemicals or fertilizer, it’s all in the hands of a few companies that are the only game in town."... "“They all tell me they’re aware of a monopoly problem, and they don’t deny it exists. But they do nothing."
sorry, when I said "thousands of small farms" I meant thousands of small companies producing Seed, Chemicals and Fertilizer.. as well as actually growing plants and animals.
So if that's the actual problem, what's the motivation for preserving small farms? Those small farms are still being supplied by those large suppliers.
Small farms are inefficient though. Farming needs a diverse range of skilled labor but infrequently: the industry as a whole trends towards larger land holders being serviced by specialist labor forces which work seasonally or regionally.
And then within that bucket, it's fairly obvious that larger holders are going to be much more resilient to regional problems if they have diversified land holdings where one area can support a downturn in another.
Inefficient from an economic perspective may not be what we need as a society.
Perhaps we need more farmers living the the county, spending money in small county towns, with more work for people with those special labor skills. Get people out of the city and more people into primary industries.
No straight up inefficient. They produce less. More land is occupied for non productive buildings. Heavy equipment cannot be used at scale. Farms which go bankrupt and fall into disrepair don't produce, and the fields degrade.
The only way what you wrote could make sense would be if it's referring to crops grown for animal feed, and comparing that to if the crops were directly consumed by people.
So, the claim is thinly veiled propaganda for vegetarianism.
Commodity production can be massively profitable. Low cost commodity producers make boatloads of cash. Saudi Aramco is exhibit A.
The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. For oil, a marginal producer is Canadian oilsands oil. It costs them $50 - $70 a barrel to produce their oil, and another $10 to ship to market. Thus the price of a barrel of oil is typically $60 - $80. If it drops below that the Canadian oilsands producers shut down, and the next most expensive producer becomes the marginal producer. (example highly over simplified)
OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits.
American farmers are not quite Saudi Aramco levels of profitable, but they are not the marginal cost producers. Large, highly mechanized farms means American farmers have extremely low labor costs compared to the rest of the world.
The last 20 or so years have been extremely profitable for American farmers.
American farmers aren’t some universal entity here. Of course it’s farm subsidies and tariffs that most heavily influence the economy reality for most American farm land, but the average small farm in the US isn’t particularly profitable. In many cases it’s closer to a hobby project than the sole income for a family.
It’s not even just a question of economies of scale, many east coast farmers grow corn just fine without any irrigation systems that’s a lot of capital you can spend on something else. Being able to lease out a tiny fraction of your land for a co-located wind farm alongside agriculture is a huge boon for many. And so it goes across a huge range of different situations.
All this variability is why you don’t see 20+% of US farmland under one giant corporation the way you see in many other industries which benefit more from economies of scale.
The average "small" farm in the US is very large and very mechanized compared to an average farm in Europe, Asia or Africa. But when I say the advantage derives from being large and mechanized, it does imply that American farms that are less large and less mechanized do not do nearly so well.
When talking about all those “family farms” in Europe with less than 10 acres that’s not the majority of farmland or necessarily a major revenue sources for those families. I known a few people in America who call a several acres of plants their garden, so in many cases there are direct parallels they just don’t call them farm or get agricultural subsidies.
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!
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?
I'm not a big fan of Roundup (I say send kids through the field cutting weeds with a bean hook like I did growing up; it builds character), but they have a legit argument that spraying post-emergence causes less runoff than tilling weeds under before planting, so you retain more soil and have less chemicals running into waterways.
It requires less because it’s a broad spectrum herbicide but the crops tolerate it. You don’t need much so not very much runs off. Needing to do multiple applications of multiple types of herbicide is definitely going to cause more runoff and more downstream effects.
> to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc.
Corn and soybean seed generally has a viable period of around 2-3 years. Monsanto hasn't been in business for seven years now. Who, exactly, do you think stored their seed for so long and is now planting all that 7+ year old seed which, at this point, has a low chance of germination?
Software always has much more extreme economies of scale than any physical commodity, and often has network effects on top of that. So it seems like a bad comparison. Do you happen to have any statistics comparing levels of market concentration across different kinds of physical goods?
Sure, it would be equally difficult to start a new company making non-niche[1] t-shirts or toilet paper or plastic cups or light bulbs today.
1 - "non-niche" a/k/a the undifferentiated "standard-quality" product in the middle of the niche. This is not about someone inventing a longer-lasting light bulb or stain-resistant t-shirt. The best analogue to farmers selling commodity soybeans is something closer to plastic food wrap or aluminum foil. Not a lot of small operators playing in or entering those spaces either.
> Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce.
Literally every new startup is a more specific version of Excel, but also direct competitors have also been funded over the last 10 years! Same for Amazon!
Interestingly, California agriculture works differently. Farmers grow many different crops. Fruits and vegetables are not subsidized the way the big field crops are. Vegetable farmers tend to grow more than one crop and often switch based on demand. (Amusingly, some who switched from tomatoes to pot are switching back.) The industry is much more demand driven.
The subsidy-driven end of farming views markets for their product as an entitlement. For dairy operators, that's almost a religious belief. World School Milk Day is September 24th.
They're desperately fighting against oat milk and almond milk in schools.
Then came Trump's tariffs. One of the current messes involves canola oil. Canada exported canola oil to the US, until Trump put on a tariff. So canola oil exporters want to export to China. China, in turn, wants a cut in Canada's 100% tariff on electric cars, which looks like it will happen. This in turn will reduce US car exports to Canada.
The current administration is soft on white-collar crime. That's part of the Project 2025 plan, and it's being carried out by refocusing the US Department of Justice on "violent crime". (Which is mostly the business of local cops, since the federal government only has jurisdiction over crimes related to interstate commerce.)
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, I’m saying that theoretically it’s a good idea because it’s food. However, that doesn’t matter because we as a society decided that our food supply is less important for feeding people than as money plumbing for rich people. The money plumbing is supposed to get the food created and allocated as efficiently as possible by rewarding innovation and competition among food businesses; unfortunately, in many instances, efficiency and innovation in plumbing hacking is as profitable or more profitable than being better food producers.
The subsidies would be fine if they were helping farmers working in good faith efficiently produce food for people to eat.
None of them are trapped, there are bigger buyers that have capital and are willing to take them out. We don't have to subsidize millionaires with our taxes, especially if they don't want the subsidies!
If we develop all agricultural land while chasing dollars it cannot end well.
Of course we won't develop everything, but I'm not sure the monetary value of the land adequately prices the value of being able to grow crops. I won't pretend to have a plan, but watching very productive cropland get converted into lawns and warehouses makes me leery of how ag land is dealt with.
Here, we are basically talking about people who grow export products, not food eaten by Americans. My understanding is we could take most of these farms completely offline without much impact to US food supply (I could be wrong on this).
There appears to be a dichotomy right now between commodity farmers whose export markets have collapsed due to national policy and those who grow food for American consumption, who are not having that problem. I'm trying to gauge how important the former is to those of us who do not work on those farms.
Only about 20% of corn and 40-45% of wheat is exported. Since a lot of the rest goes to animal feed either directly or as distillers grains (waste product from ethanol/biofuel production that is still edible), it could definitely impact food security here in the US.
The complicating factor is that those grains are the feed for the last stage in beef production, with about half of all US agricultural land going to pasture for the previous stage. Eliminating those grains could significantly impact how much food the rest of the land can actually produce.
Those are big percentages of export. You also raise the point that there are other categories of domestic use that also are not food (distillation, biofuels).
But again, we're not necessarily talking about farms literally closing. This is mostly about which rich person gets to operate a given plot of land. If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care? I still have yet to see a good answer as to why we should care which millionaire operates these farms.
Until you have a bad crop year. That's when you are glad you are in the habit of massively overproducing for seemingly unnecessary reasons. Like we saw glimmers of during the 2022 global food crises, those exports (and other uses, like biofuels) start to wind down when the locals begin to worry about going hungry.
> If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care?
We don't — unless many farmers are all at risk of going under at the exact same time. That's when disruptions become realistic. That concern isn't limited to farming. 2008 and 2020 showed great examples of where we feared many players in other industries all going under at the same time and did what we could to prevent that from happening for much the same reasons.
One approach I've seen, aside from zoning related laws, is to give ag land huge property tax breaks. Want to convert it to some other use? Expect a 90% increase in property taxes.
It's far from perfect since some large landowners run "hobby" farms to get the tax break while producing nothing of significance for the greater society. Other developers take the bet that they can get the land developed and sold before the biggest bills come due and it will be someone else's problem.
To a certain degree, isn't diversifying kind of antithetical to the niche grain serves? That is to say, it seems like the whole role of grains is to be a fairly generic source of starch. I'm not sure that you could diversify much while still serving that role.
Point taken. I think the "grain industry" has that problem, but no individual farmer is duty-bound to go 100% on grain for export every year. For example, they could grow grain crops intended for consumption in the US as a hedge against the (predictable) disruption in export markets.
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.
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.
How does capacity work? If the US needs food because of an export stop of supplier countries because of a crisis, those farmers can't swap out what they produce. Depending on the year of time it might take 12 months to swap out export products for something else. This is not "standby-capacity".
Many things that can stop imports take a lot longer than 12 months to resolve. Wars can take several years for example.
Getting a domestic replacement in 12 months of belt tightening would still be a lot better than having to deal with several more years of that.
Also I'd expect that there are cases were we export X and import Y, and if Y was cut off we could switch to using X somewhat as a substitute. I don't know offhand of any specific plant foods where this is the case, but pork and beef illustrate the idea. We import about 15% of our beef. If that got cut off we could cut some pork exports and use that as a substitute. It's not a great substitute but it is calories that can get you through a crisis.
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).
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".
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.
>"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?"
Unfortunately, from what I've seen the only candidates who seem legitimately interested in solving the problem don't stand a chance of getting elected, because they don't belong to either of the major parties.
I don't think capital naturally accrues capital. Look at any country that experimented with "land reform", i.e. taking land from capitalists and distributing it to the workers. I'll save you the wikipedia read. Production collapses, less is sold, less is earned, people become poorer. Capital is destroyed.
That's not true? The US dispossessed Native Americans of their land and dramatically increased agricultural production. The UK went through massive land ownership changes as a result of the Black Death and dramatically increased production after the fact. China went through massive land dispossesion and produces more than it ever has. Same with the Netherlands.
> I don't think capital naturally accrues capital.
It depends on the monetary system. Those monetary systems that mostly accompanied capitalism have a feature that leads to this capital accumulation effect: interest/debt.
Financial capital is kept in banks, which deposit it at their central bank. There it naturally accrues more capital due to interest. (Except in exceptional circumstances like the Swiss negative interest period)
But still, lots of lenders go bust. Lots of loans end up non-performing. Interest isn't a free money loophole, it's profit in exchange for risk.
Presently, the safety of bank deposits are in most countries guaranteed by the government, but before this they weren't risk free either. That's why bank runs happened. People panicked to get their capital out before it was gone.
In the private market: yes the interest is a compensation for the risk taken by the lender.
However certain institutions like banks have access to so called "risk free" lending. They can (must) deposit capital at the central bank and get paid interest. In the US this would be the "interest on reserve balances" or through reverse repo transactions, where the FED pays the interest.
From the point of view of the bank (inside a financial system) this is risk free profit.
No it doesn't, regardless of which monetary system you can invest resources to make more resources. Communists also does this, tribes also does this, everyone does this, having more lets you invest to get even more.
Yeah I can see how this leaves a bad taste. A few bullets I found interesting while looking into this:
1. It was repealed in (also the Biden admin's) IRA about a year later
2. The argument for special programs for racial minority farmers is that only 1% of COVID aid for farmers went to minority farmers, largely because such aid was dolled out based on existing holdings/historical output. Minority farmers have been excluded from USDA development programs for generations now, so their holdings/output left them unable to benefit from from the COVID aid
Altogether seems like a reasonable problem to try to solve, but not a good way to solve it, and it's good that it got repealed ~14 months later for a race-blind version of the same program.
There is always nuance, but that never matters because the headline is all people see and that makes them angry. “Help for 1% of minority farmers” isn’t as juicy and doesn’t further an agenda.
1. Seattle: The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
2. Pennsylvania: There are all sorts of programs designed to combat specific problems -- in this case the program was designed to counteract the fact that certain racial groups have been excluded from financial services for a long time. Would you characterize an aid program that only serves veterans to be discriminatory against non-veterans?
3. FAA: You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source, let me know if you'd like to provide another
> The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
Crazy or not, if someone starts giving training on how you, specifically can try to be less of a monster, it's reasonable to assume that someone doesn't like you very much.
> You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source
Oh, this doesn't count as "combating a specific problem"? Diversity is so great it must be mandatory?
Anyway sure you can keep trying to explain this obvious trend away with sophistry, but don't be surprised when others don't stick their heads in the sand with the same enthusiasm as you.
You don't know what an op-ed is, do you? Look it up! Here, you can type this into your favorite LLM:
"what's the difference between an article published by Wall Street Journal and an op-ed published by Wall Street Journal in terms of their expected journalistic quality?"
Re the training: did it have anything to do with being a monster, or was it about identifying and counteracting subconscious biases?
Do you think subconscious biases don't exist? Do you think having them intrinsically makes you a monster?
Re the white-only towns: nobody said diversity is mandatory. Where are you getting that idea?
Don't worry, despite the political climate today, people bummed out about the difficulty of creating whites-only towns are few and far between. In a few years you'll be ashamed of your views just like you were a few years ago, and as you should be.
He chose what to cite, and there's a reason he chose the figure that can most easily be massaged by picking and choosing what counts as terrorism and what doesn't, vs. something objective, like homicide rates.
Probably because homicide rates have been going down for decades (with a slight COVID bump which has since diminished) while domestic terrorism rates have been going up for the last several years.
I think it's clear based on your advocacy for a whites-only town what you're trying to get at here, but the data doesn't bear it out. Homicide isn't a growing emergency. Domestic terrorism is. That's why the FBI focused on it.
Oh they could probably swallow one specific program. The problem is that entire side of the political spectrum (not just the Democratic party itself) considers them somewhere between second-class citizen or outright enemy. Another example:
As a straight, white, male I don't really feel that I'm a second-class citizen nor the enemy. Have you considered getting off Twitter for a while?
It's not clear to me the federal judiciary should match the composition of the population of lawyers as opposed to the composition of the people whom they judge.
In fact as you can see here, Obama appointed people largely similar to what you'd expect to see in the population (without bothering to look into specific geographies). It was Trump who was wildly aberrational. In fact even more aberrational than Biden, who at least has the believable rationale of trying to rebalance the courts after Trump took such a pro-male (76%!!) and pro-white (85%!!) approach.
For context, the US is <50% male, and about 60% white.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So many people voted for Trump, like farmers, when it was so obviously against their own interests that many people are enjoying the schadenfreude when these people realize that Trump is also hurting them, not just the people they wanted him to hurt. It is like telling someone not to touch the stove because it is hot and they do it anyway.
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.
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.
Seemed highly specific to me. Monopolization of suppliers who lobby for bailouts instead of change, knowing that bailout money goes straight from farmers to the suppliers.
I think the truth is we have too many farmers and instead of letting the market decide which ones continue and which ones fold, we subsidise to keep them all going. It's been happening for decades and needs to change. It'll be a painful change but necessary for a healthy farm market where the farmers that remain can produce plenty and get good prices for their crops.
I did some computer work for a large family farm in north east Colorado. A letter from the state was framed and hanging next to the desk. It showed a list of family-owned farms in the state and how many sections (640 acre lots - 1 mile square) each farm had in CRP (Conservation Reserve Program), which is the state of Colorado paying farmers not to farm, and how much money they received. This family farm was at the top of the list, receiving millions of dollars each year to not farm.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s not secret , it’s published widely and I read it often. Here’s an example of how much cheaper Canadian farmland is an American farmland.
And your farmland is not only cheaper, but it’s more productive.
You can’t compare the United States and Canada because we have different political systems. I mean, you guys get free healthcare. You can probably afford to buy land because you’re not spending all your money on outrageous insurance premiums, or out-of-pocket cost from going to the doctor.
> Here’s an example of how much cheaper Canadian farmland is an American farmland.
Western Canada, maybe. Now try Ontario... It makes the I-states look like the land is being given away. Still, not hearing of any looming farm bankruptcies in Ontario.
> And your farmland is not only cheaper, but it’s more productive.
It's almost as though comparative advantage is a real thing, and nations can be better off overall through specialisation and open trade.
> You can probably afford to buy land because you’re not spending all your money on outrageous insurance premiums, or out-of-pocket cost from going to the doctor.
But: isn't he paying for all that in his taxes instead of directly?
The article is not talking about people who own large tracts of farmland; it's talking about monopolies controlling the supply of seeds, chemicals, and fertilizers. At any rate, if Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland, that means he owns a bit less than three one-hundredths of one percent of the US's 880,000,000 acres of farmland.
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 ).
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
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> “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...
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.
I cannot comprehend the style how politician campaigns are funded in US. Especially corporate sponsorship of politicians. It basically seems as an ordinary corruption to me.
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
There are some large dairy cooperatives in the US. I'm not sure how healthy they are as an outsider, in general I think agriculture is a good place for cooperatives.
It looks like Michigan's milk producer cooperative is selling in some partnership with India’s Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Limited (GCMMF).
> There are some large dairy cooperatives in the US
They don't tend to own processing infra, though that is slowly starting to change. And some of them line "Land o Lakes" are cooperatives in name only, and are very abusive to small farmers, because they can only process at 1k+ head sizes.
> It looks like Michigan's milk producer cooperative is selling in some partnership with India’s Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Limited (GCMMF)
Yep! Because India can't export Indian milk to the US without tariffs, and American cows are fed meat, so Amul decided to corner the vegetarian milk market by making the cooperative deal with MI.
Blume Ventures had a good write-up on this I need to find.
>The economics of American farming fail because 70% of profit is retained by the processor
The above sounds like a very Marxian criticism though, essentially Marx's exploitation thing, only instead of considering a proletariat and capital owners, small capital owners and big capital owners who are middlemen and able to lock down the ability of the small capital owners to sell their goods.
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.
Nope. The MSP laws didn't affect cooperatives. The issue is, a common side hustle Punjabi, Haryanvi, JK, and Himachali farmers do is import MSP crops from states like MP or Bihar and then sell it to the MSP broker in Punjab, Haryana, JK, or Himachal. As trucking in India is largely consolidated in PB/HR/HP/JK it makes it easier for larger farmers in those regions to build the supply chains needed to do an MSP arbitrage.
Essentially, instead of farming, you become a commodity broker (arhatiya)
This is why you didn't see similar protests in other states in India that also have MSP like Kerala or Gujarat, because they don't have the same logistics chain (otherwise they'd do it as well).
> Another issue might be that PDS was abolished in the 80s (utility stores at provincial level are similar but not the same
Oof, that is not good. India has shown that a PDS style model can work nowadays thanks to digitization. Pakistan needs to redeploy the PDS system if the ag economy is to recovery, especially after the floods.
> arhatiya
Yep, but they tend to be in those commodities that aren't covered by a cooperative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s going to ultimately hurt the US. If our companies don’t have to compete or innovate, the rest of the world will outcompete and out innovate us. We will be the backwater refusing to get with the times.
A few will get to reign in hell, or retreat to their bunkers, or leave with their riches.
I think we need a new word or a new definition for monopoly. Even concentration - whether it is a monopoly or oligopoly or not - is a problem. It’s how Walmart gets away with squeezing farmers and demanding total compliance from them while refusing shipments arbitrarily, keeping them in permanent dependent serfdom.
If they did, they would vote to kick it even harder. Farming in America is a giant grift off the taxpayer, from ethanol to tariffs to family farm tax exemptions.
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.
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.
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.
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].
Why on earth would it be? You've lost the thread, this is about djinnandtonic's claims, not what the article says. Here, a quick recap:
1. djinnandtonic: I have no sympathy for the complaining farmers in this article, who are probably ones that cheered a separate chainsawing-bureaucrats event. They willfully chose a cruel mess.
2. NotGMan: Comparing the misfortune of good farmers to the misfortune of bad bureaucrats is unfair.
3. Terr: djinanndtonic wasn't comparing the two groups, djinnandtonic was using that event to to argue that rural farmers' voted for the mess they find themselves in.
4. Kulahan: Which line says farmers are voting that way?
5. Terr: djinanndtonic's line right here about the chainsawing-bureaucrats thing, because it's a reference to [...]
6. Kulahan: OMG THAT LINE ISN'T EVEN IN THE ARTICLE!111
7. Terr: Of course it isn't, because the article wasn't about their vote patterns, that was introduced in the HN comment that NotGMan critiqued. Here's a recap [Recursion Error Detected]
I was making a point that complaining about strawmen you invent is a waste of time.
The people who clapped as musk revved a chainsaw and then went home and complained about farm shit don’t exist. Farmers aren’t spending all day on Twitter. They don’t even know who musk is aside from the CEO of Tesla.
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.
> I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well
As a small commodity farmer, I don't see why it can't work well. Cash crop farming is quite well suited to small operations as far as I am concerned. The actual hard place to be is the mid-sized farmer trying to manage boatloads of debt.
The current crop price situation is not ideal, but we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years. Save during the good times to weather the bad is farming 101. I suspect, given how much equipment prices jumped in the last few years, that some of these guys thought they could get away with going out and buying a bunch of new toys and that's what really has gotten them into trouble.
Yeah, there's this whole YouTube genre of fairly unassuming farms showing off millions of dollars in the latest and greatest John Deere equipment and coming up with rationalizations about how it's going to pay for itself very soon.
But the bottom line is that there are fat years and lean years in agriculture, but if it gets really bad for a sufficient number of farmers, the government bails you out because the alternative - no food - is recognized as worse.
Thanks for weighing in here.
> we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years
Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers? From TFA:
> This is the worst agriculture economy of my lifetime over at least the past three years
Thanks again for commenting.
> Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers?
I honestly have no idea. Three years ago in particular is when the perfect storm lead to historically high commodity prices. If that's what they consider the worst time in agriculture history, I have no understanding of where they are coming from. The problem right now is that the input costs are still trying to act as if it is still three years ago, which is a problem, but the cure for high prices is high prices. I see no reason to think that will last.
As suggested before, it is likely that they are overleveraged and the loss of profitability coupled with higher interest rates is what is killing them. That's the trouble with trying to be a mid-sized player.
[dead]
Because no farmer ever will tell you he had a good year. He should have sold a month earlier than he did, or held on a week longer. Just the way it is, I guess.
In my business I see their books. Good years and bad years. Some things are more volatile - dairy can swing between losses and significant profits. Layers are pretty steady if you are on a contract, as long as you don't get the avian flu. Produce farmers rarely have a loss year, but their high income years are generally not as high as crop farmers, who sometimes do show a significant annual loss. More risk = more reward.
The last few years have been pretty good overall, for my clients.
> In my business I see their books. Good years and bad years. Some
Can you share the typical interest rates for these "family farm" (2000 acres?) ?
2000 acres! That’s only worth $30+ million up here in the corn belt.
> In 2024, there were over 100 sales of excellent productivity farmland in Region 6. The sale price per acre ranged from $11,000 to $22,508, with an average value of $17,210 per acre.
[1] https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/farm-focus/2025-04-18-2...
> That’s only worth $30+ million up here in the corn belt.
And more like $60 million (USD; $80 million CAD) in the Canadian corn belt, which is not even nearly as productive. It is astonishing how cheap US farmland is.
The comments/narrative in TFA don't line up with FRED. 2022 was like 3x more profitable overall compared to 2016, and 2023 wasn't much worse. It's definitely coming back down.
From TFA though, 2400 is like 2x-2.5x median farm size. That's not a small farm size. It's not a massive corpo farm, but it's not a small farm. So the segment quoted in that article might be under some pretty specific pressures (other commenters alluded to - they may have bought some very pricey equipment during good years - an actually small farm will get by on shittier equipment or just rent for a brief harvest)
My dad told me about _his_ dad painfully learning the same lesson in the 1930s. So it goes.
Farmers that learned the lesson didn't have their kids go into farming.
Lots of farmers in my area owning equipment with fresh paint (well, plastic panels these days) that can't make land payments, or at least complaining about it. The ROI on new equipment is poor and when things were booming the farmers lost discipline and the manufacturers were happy to add features and cost - fun for everyone! Chickens are coming home to roost now for a lot of folks and some of them are sharpening their pencils and some of them are in denial - in my opinion.
I recognize that harvest windows are restricted, but a coop of local farmers having shared ownership in the bigger toys seems like it might make some economic sense.
And a quick web search shows that some are doing it: https://www.roguefarmcorps.org/equipment-sharing
You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?
There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? Well, that’s the goal, to just have a company to have a bigger person buy you up and then you go away with the money and everyone else suffers.
There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
> You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?
I'm just not sure how else you go from some of the most profitable years in agriculture history to bankruptcy in the span of a year or two. Vendor prices have not yet come back down in line with reality, nobody is going to question that, but, as they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. These temporary aberrations are par for the course. For what reason is there to believe that this time is different?
> There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech.
Yes, Nvidia looks quite similar in a lot of ways. But the pick and shovel makers have always been best positioned to take advantage of gold rushes. That isn't unusual.
> And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up?
I'm not really sure how this applies in any way, but especially because you don't really have to compete for customers in commodities. A commodity implies that you have automatic customers. It is not like you have to try and convince users to use your product over Google's.
> There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
I don't doubt it, but the main person quoted in the article is sitting on like $20 million to $30 million of cultivated land and $??? of additional land (Could be hundreds of thousands, could be another 8 figures).
To the extent there is a separation of wealth problem, it's not at all clear where that person is in the separation. Maybe they debt financed the whole thing plus equipment under ZIRP with a non-fixed interest loan, and are now staring down the barrel of $1M-$2M annual interest payments, with very little capital of their own. Maybe they have a total net worth of $10M+ even if they had to sell, and are actually fine if they just quit the game right now. I dunno.
This sounds like victim blaming.
When other businesses can't hack it, we let them go bankrupt and do something more productive. Why do farmers get treated any differently?
Because it's in the national interest to not let them go bankrupt (because without food you die).
This is scaremongering. Oh noez, we'll all die unless this group gets a bailout from Uncle Sugar.
That sounds like the anti-vax argument that's so used to having the thing they forget the realities.
The difference being that viruses exist, and the scenario in question with food is ridiculous nonsense.
> The difference being that viruses exist, and the scenario in question with food is ridiculous nonsense.
Its not, famines are a real thing and many people die from them. They only way money can prevent famines is by making farmers grow more food last year.
So its just as important to pay farmers with government money to keep growing food as it is to pay hospitals to keep treating people.
Do we? What we saw in 2020 and 2008 suggests otherwise.
Countries don't want to be too reliant on food imports if/when they go to war with their neighbours
Sometimes "victims" have been looking for some consequences for quite a while. Poke a bear long enough to be hurt, don't be surprised people blame you, "the victim".
An important point that’s missed in this is that these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security. So regardless of what an analogous business in another sector may choose to do, we really want small farms to be sustainable all over the country.
> these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security
Hmm, that's only true if the kinds of crops those small farms are regularly growing are the kinds we'd want to have already in the ground as an unexpected "food security" crisis occurs. In other words, durable staples with long shelf-lives, as opposed to cash-crops for export, quick-spoiling luxuries, etc.
Are there any stats that might confirm/disprove that? Because if most those small farms are geared to pistachios or asparagus or hemp, then they aren't really serving as a national safety net.
If they are so important to US food security, why do they care what happens in China?
This is sort of a tricky way of pointing out that they largely do not grow food for the US.
What is the basis for the idea that small farms are vital for food security? Farms, sure. Small farms? We need low-productivity small farms for food security?
I'm no expert in the field, but if asked, I would prefer thousands of small farms protecting our food security rather than a handful of companies too big to fail.
When you have more diversity, I imagine you would get more resilience, more competition, and market forces work properly.
(pun intended)
I don't get the small businesses fetishism. Large companies are efficient, resilient, more likely to follow the letter of the law, and more scalably prosecutable if they don't.
The US is currently experiencing a fairly extreme security threat across multiple industries due dependency on a single provider. Boeing and Intel jump to mind, for example.
If that's your answer then you're vastly underestimating how much farmland there is. We have 1.6 million small farms, averaging a couple hundred acres. Large farms usually have a couple thousand acres.
If every farm in the US was around 3000 acres, we would still have a quarter million farms. Even 100k acre mega farms would leave us with 8000+ farms.
"“Seed, chemicals or fertilizer, it’s all in the hands of a few companies that are the only game in town."... "“They all tell me they’re aware of a monopoly problem, and they don’t deny it exists. But they do nothing."
sorry, when I said "thousands of small farms" I meant thousands of small companies producing Seed, Chemicals and Fertilizer.. as well as actually growing plants and animals.
So if that's the actual problem, what's the motivation for preserving small farms? Those small farms are still being supplied by those large suppliers.
Small farms are inefficient though. Farming needs a diverse range of skilled labor but infrequently: the industry as a whole trends towards larger land holders being serviced by specialist labor forces which work seasonally or regionally.
And then within that bucket, it's fairly obvious that larger holders are going to be much more resilient to regional problems if they have diversified land holdings where one area can support a downturn in another.
This is all Renaissance era knowledge.
Inefficient from an economic perspective may not be what we need as a society.
Perhaps we need more farmers living the the county, spending money in small county towns, with more work for people with those special labor skills. Get people out of the city and more people into primary industries.
No straight up inefficient. They produce less. More land is occupied for non productive buildings. Heavy equipment cannot be used at scale. Farms which go bankrupt and fall into disrepair don't produce, and the fields degrade.
They straight up make less food.
According to food bank Australia, we make 3 times the amount of food we need, and 70% of the food that is wasted is perfectly edible.
Update: I also recognize that nobody wants to pay three times the price for all their groceries. I'm not advocating anything, just shooting the shit.
The only way what you wrote could make sense would be if it's referring to crops grown for animal feed, and comparing that to if the crops were directly consumed by people.
So, the claim is thinly veiled propaganda for vegetarianism.
Commodity production can be massively profitable. Low cost commodity producers make boatloads of cash. Saudi Aramco is exhibit A.
The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. For oil, a marginal producer is Canadian oilsands oil. It costs them $50 - $70 a barrel to produce their oil, and another $10 to ship to market. Thus the price of a barrel of oil is typically $60 - $80. If it drops below that the Canadian oilsands producers shut down, and the next most expensive producer becomes the marginal producer. (example highly over simplified)
OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits.
American farmers are not quite Saudi Aramco levels of profitable, but they are not the marginal cost producers. Large, highly mechanized farms means American farmers have extremely low labor costs compared to the rest of the world.
The last 20 or so years have been extremely profitable for American farmers.
American farmers aren’t some universal entity here. Of course it’s farm subsidies and tariffs that most heavily influence the economy reality for most American farm land, but the average small farm in the US isn’t particularly profitable. In many cases it’s closer to a hobby project than the sole income for a family.
It’s not even just a question of economies of scale, many east coast farmers grow corn just fine without any irrigation systems that’s a lot of capital you can spend on something else. Being able to lease out a tiny fraction of your land for a co-located wind farm alongside agriculture is a huge boon for many. And so it goes across a huge range of different situations.
All this variability is why you don’t see 20+% of US farmland under one giant corporation the way you see in many other industries which benefit more from economies of scale.
The average "small" farm in the US is very large and very mechanized compared to an average farm in Europe, Asia or Africa. But when I say the advantage derives from being large and mechanized, it does imply that American farms that are less large and less mechanized do not do nearly so well.
When talking about all those “family farms” in Europe with less than 10 acres that’s not the majority of farmland or necessarily a major revenue sources for those families. I known a few people in America who call a several acres of plants their garden, so in many cases there are direct parallels they just don’t call them farm or get agricultural subsidies.
> > OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits.
What is the source for this 10 bucks figure?
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!
Generally round up and similar things require less overall pesticide compared to normal crops
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?
I'm not a big fan of Roundup (I say send kids through the field cutting weeds with a bean hook like I did growing up; it builds character), but they have a legit argument that spraying post-emergence causes less runoff than tilling weeds under before planting, so you retain more soil and have less chemicals running into waterways.
It requires less because it’s a broad spectrum herbicide but the crops tolerate it. You don’t need much so not very much runs off. Needing to do multiple applications of multiple types of herbicide is definitely going to cause more runoff and more downstream effects.
No-till agriculture that uses herbicides to keep the weeds under control is better for the soil.
> to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc.
Corn and soybean seed generally has a viable period of around 2-3 years. Monsanto hasn't been in business for seven years now. Who, exactly, do you think stored their seed for so long and is now planting all that 7+ year old seed which, at this point, has a low chance of germination?
Don't play the fool, Monsanto's ghoulish soul is operating at peak influence under a different name
Better burn some witches just to be safe, right?
Do not underestimate the power of Monsanto Derangement Syndrome. To its faithful, anything is possible.
Software always has much more extreme economies of scale than any physical commodity, and often has network effects on top of that. So it seems like a bad comparison. Do you happen to have any statistics comparing levels of market concentration across different kinds of physical goods?
Sure, it would be equally difficult to start a new company making non-niche[1] t-shirts or toilet paper or plastic cups or light bulbs today.
1 - "non-niche" a/k/a the undifferentiated "standard-quality" product in the middle of the niche. This is not about someone inventing a longer-lasting light bulb or stain-resistant t-shirt. The best analogue to farmers selling commodity soybeans is something closer to plastic food wrap or aluminum foil. Not a lot of small operators playing in or entering those spaces either.
> Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce.
Literally every new startup is a more specific version of Excel, but also direct competitors have also been funded over the last 10 years! Same for Amazon!
Interestingly, California agriculture works differently. Farmers grow many different crops. Fruits and vegetables are not subsidized the way the big field crops are. Vegetable farmers tend to grow more than one crop and often switch based on demand. (Amusingly, some who switched from tomatoes to pot are switching back.) The industry is much more demand driven.
The subsidy-driven end of farming views markets for their product as an entitlement. For dairy operators, that's almost a religious belief. World School Milk Day is September 24th. They're desperately fighting against oat milk and almond milk in schools.
Then came Trump's tariffs. One of the current messes involves canola oil. Canada exported canola oil to the US, until Trump put on a tariff. So canola oil exporters want to export to China. China, in turn, wants a cut in Canada's 100% tariff on electric cars, which looks like it will happen. This in turn will reduce US car exports to Canada.
The current administration is soft on white-collar crime. That's part of the Project 2025 plan, and it's being carried out by refocusing the US Department of Justice on "violent crime". (Which is mostly the business of local cops, since the federal government only has jurisdiction over crimes related to interstate commerce.)
> 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.
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.
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?
Yeah, I’m saying that theoretically it’s a good idea because it’s food. However, that doesn’t matter because we as a society decided that our food supply is less important for feeding people than as money plumbing for rich people. The money plumbing is supposed to get the food created and allocated as efficiently as possible by rewarding innovation and competition among food businesses; unfortunately, in many instances, efficiency and innovation in plumbing hacking is as profitable or more profitable than being better food producers.
The subsidies would be fine if they were helping farmers working in good faith efficiently produce food for people to eat.
Maybe we should nationalize farms so no one has to be hungry?
subsidizing businesses that are trapped in that role is essentially not that different from a nationalized or otherwise centrally planned industry
> businesses that are trapped in that role
None of them are trapped, there are bigger buyers that have capital and are willing to take them out. We don't have to subsidize millionaires with our taxes, especially if they don't want the subsidies!
If we develop all agricultural land while chasing dollars it cannot end well.
Of course we won't develop everything, but I'm not sure the monetary value of the land adequately prices the value of being able to grow crops. I won't pretend to have a plan, but watching very productive cropland get converted into lawns and warehouses makes me leery of how ag land is dealt with.
Here, we are basically talking about people who grow export products, not food eaten by Americans. My understanding is we could take most of these farms completely offline without much impact to US food supply (I could be wrong on this).
There appears to be a dichotomy right now between commodity farmers whose export markets have collapsed due to national policy and those who grow food for American consumption, who are not having that problem. I'm trying to gauge how important the former is to those of us who do not work on those farms.
Only about 20% of corn and 40-45% of wheat is exported. Since a lot of the rest goes to animal feed either directly or as distillers grains (waste product from ethanol/biofuel production that is still edible), it could definitely impact food security here in the US.
The complicating factor is that those grains are the feed for the last stage in beef production, with about half of all US agricultural land going to pasture for the previous stage. Eliminating those grains could significantly impact how much food the rest of the land can actually produce.
Those are big percentages of export. You also raise the point that there are other categories of domestic use that also are not food (distillation, biofuels).
But again, we're not necessarily talking about farms literally closing. This is mostly about which rich person gets to operate a given plot of land. If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care? I still have yet to see a good answer as to why we should care which millionaire operates these farms.
> Those are big percentages of export.
Until you have a bad crop year. That's when you are glad you are in the habit of massively overproducing for seemingly unnecessary reasons. Like we saw glimmers of during the 2022 global food crises, those exports (and other uses, like biofuels) start to wind down when the locals begin to worry about going hungry.
> If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care?
We don't — unless many farmers are all at risk of going under at the exact same time. That's when disruptions become realistic. That concern isn't limited to farming. 2008 and 2020 showed great examples of where we feared many players in other industries all going under at the same time and did what we could to prevent that from happening for much the same reasons.
One approach I've seen, aside from zoning related laws, is to give ag land huge property tax breaks. Want to convert it to some other use? Expect a 90% increase in property taxes.
It's far from perfect since some large landowners run "hobby" farms to get the tax break while producing nothing of significance for the greater society. Other developers take the bet that they can get the land developed and sold before the biggest bills come due and it will be someone else's problem.
To a certain degree, isn't diversifying kind of antithetical to the niche grain serves? That is to say, it seems like the whole role of grains is to be a fairly generic source of starch. I'm not sure that you could diversify much while still serving that role.
Point taken. I think the "grain industry" has that problem, but no individual farmer is duty-bound to go 100% on grain for export every year. For example, they could grow grain crops intended for consumption in the US as a hedge against the (predictable) disruption in export markets.
>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.
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.
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.
How does capacity work? If the US needs food because of an export stop of supplier countries because of a crisis, those farmers can't swap out what they produce. Depending on the year of time it might take 12 months to swap out export products for something else. This is not "standby-capacity".
Many things that can stop imports take a lot longer than 12 months to resolve. Wars can take several years for example.
Getting a domestic replacement in 12 months of belt tightening would still be a lot better than having to deal with several more years of that.
Also I'd expect that there are cases were we export X and import Y, and if Y was cut off we could switch to using X somewhat as a substitute. I don't know offhand of any specific plant foods where this is the case, but pork and beef illustrate the idea. We import about 15% of our beef. If that got cut off we could cut some pork exports and use that as a substitute. It's not a great substitute but it is calories that can get you through a crisis.
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).
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".
Family farming is just a welfare grift at this point.
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.
>"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.
It seems like this is becoming a problem across a lot of industries. At least oligopolies.
Almost as if capital naturally accrues to capital... hmm...
If only these people would vote for folks who stand a chance of adding friction to this process.
Unfortunately, from what I've seen the only candidates who seem legitimately interested in solving the problem don't stand a chance of getting elected, because they don't belong to either of the major parties.
I don't think capital naturally accrues capital. Look at any country that experimented with "land reform", i.e. taking land from capitalists and distributing it to the workers. I'll save you the wikipedia read. Production collapses, less is sold, less is earned, people become poorer. Capital is destroyed.
I would describe seizure and redistribution of land to be an exogenous shock, wouldn't you?
At some point (after decades) the shock ought to wear off, but production levels don't return.
That's not true? The US dispossessed Native Americans of their land and dramatically increased agricultural production. The UK went through massive land ownership changes as a result of the Black Death and dramatically increased production after the fact. China went through massive land dispossesion and produces more than it ever has. Same with the Netherlands.
What examples do you have in mind?
Expropriation. Peruvian land reform in 1969 or Cuban land reform in the late 50s are examples I'm well acquainted with.
The French revolution.
> I don't think capital naturally accrues capital.
It depends on the monetary system. Those monetary systems that mostly accompanied capitalism have a feature that leads to this capital accumulation effect: interest/debt.
Financial capital is kept in banks, which deposit it at their central bank. There it naturally accrues more capital due to interest. (Except in exceptional circumstances like the Swiss negative interest period)
But still, lots of lenders go bust. Lots of loans end up non-performing. Interest isn't a free money loophole, it's profit in exchange for risk.
Presently, the safety of bank deposits are in most countries guaranteed by the government, but before this they weren't risk free either. That's why bank runs happened. People panicked to get their capital out before it was gone.
In the private market: yes the interest is a compensation for the risk taken by the lender.
However certain institutions like banks have access to so called "risk free" lending. They can (must) deposit capital at the central bank and get paid interest. In the US this would be the "interest on reserve balances" or through reverse repo transactions, where the FED pays the interest. From the point of view of the bank (inside a financial system) this is risk free profit.
> It depends on the monetary system
No it doesn't, regardless of which monetary system you can invest resources to make more resources. Communists also does this, tribes also does this, everyone does this, having more lets you invest to get even more.
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Yeah, it's a mystery why they don't vote for those folks...
The Biden Administration Is Still Banning White Farmers From Federal Aid - https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/20/the-biden-administratio...
Yeah I can see how this leaves a bad taste. A few bullets I found interesting while looking into this:
1. It was repealed in (also the Biden admin's) IRA about a year later
2. The argument for special programs for racial minority farmers is that only 1% of COVID aid for farmers went to minority farmers, largely because such aid was dolled out based on existing holdings/historical output. Minority farmers have been excluded from USDA development programs for generations now, so their holdings/output left them unable to benefit from from the COVID aid
Altogether seems like a reasonable problem to try to solve, but not a good way to solve it, and it's good that it got repealed ~14 months later for a race-blind version of the same program.
There is always nuance, but that never matters because the headline is all people see and that makes them angry. “Help for 1% of minority farmers” isn’t as juicy and doesn’t further an agenda.
There's a million other similar incidents:
The city is training white municipal employees to overcome their “internalized racial superiority.” - https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-...
Pennsylvania launched business grants that excluded white-owned businesses* - https://web.archive.org/web/20241218025310/https://dced.pa.g...
FAA turned away applicants based on (white) race - https://www.wsj.com/articles/affirmative-action-lands-in-the...
Illinois runs a scholarship that excludes white applicants - https://www.ibhe.org/dfiapplicant.html
Biden calls white supremacy ‘most dangerous terrorist threat’ in speech at Howard - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/13/biden-howard-univer...
And while government excludes and demonizes them, whites are not even allowed to leave without condemnation and legal threats (only threats so far) - https://www.tmz.com/2025/07/24/arkansas-attorney-general-sla...
At some point you just have to believe them when they tell you who they are.
1. Seattle: The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
2. Pennsylvania: There are all sorts of programs designed to combat specific problems -- in this case the program was designed to counteract the fact that certain racial groups have been excluded from financial services for a long time. Would you characterize an aid program that only serves veterans to be discriminatory against non-veterans?
3. FAA: You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source, let me know if you'd like to provide another
4. See point (2)
5. Biden was citing the FBI itself, which at the time was led by Trump appointee Chris Wray [https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-12-05_-_...]
6. You're lamenting that people get legal threats for creating obviously discriminatory white-only towns? Welp, thanks for outing yourself.
Indeed, at some point you just have to believe them when they tell you who they are.
> The training was optional. Seems not that crazy to offer?
Crazy or not, if someone starts giving training on how you, specifically can try to be less of a monster, it's reasonable to assume that someone doesn't like you very much.
> You should probably not cite an op-ed as a source
Here's another source, if the Wall Street Journal is too unreliable for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944203
> creating obviously discriminatory white-only towns
Oh, this doesn't count as "combating a specific problem"? Diversity is so great it must be mandatory?
Anyway sure you can keep trying to explain this obvious trend away with sophistry, but don't be surprised when others don't stick their heads in the sand with the same enthusiasm as you.
You don't know what an op-ed is, do you? Look it up! Here, you can type this into your favorite LLM:
"what's the difference between an article published by Wall Street Journal and an op-ed published by Wall Street Journal in terms of their expected journalistic quality?"
Re the training: did it have anything to do with being a monster, or was it about identifying and counteracting subconscious biases?
Do you think subconscious biases don't exist? Do you think having them intrinsically makes you a monster?
Re the white-only towns: nobody said diversity is mandatory. Where are you getting that idea?
Don't worry, despite the political climate today, people bummed out about the difficulty of creating whites-only towns are few and far between. In a few years you'll be ashamed of your views just like you were a few years ago, and as you should be.
> Biden was citing the FBI itself
He chose what to cite, and there's a reason he chose the figure that can most easily be massaged by picking and choosing what counts as terrorism and what doesn't, vs. something objective, like homicide rates.
Probably because homicide rates have been going down for decades (with a slight COVID bump which has since diminished) while domestic terrorism rates have been going up for the last several years.
I think it's clear based on your advocacy for a whites-only town what you're trying to get at here, but the data doesn't bear it out. Homicide isn't a growing emergency. Domestic terrorism is. That's why the FBI focused on it.
Oh they could probably swallow one specific program. The problem is that entire side of the political spectrum (not just the Democratic party itself) considers them somewhere between second-class citizen or outright enemy. Another example:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gz4GMoOW0AAC5M5.jpg
As a straight, white, male I don't really feel that I'm a second-class citizen nor the enemy. Have you considered getting off Twitter for a while?
It's not clear to me the federal judiciary should match the composition of the population of lawyers as opposed to the composition of the people whom they judge.
In fact as you can see here, Obama appointed people largely similar to what you'd expect to see in the population (without bothering to look into specific geographies). It was Trump who was wildly aberrational. In fact even more aberrational than Biden, who at least has the believable rationale of trying to rebalance the courts after Trump took such a pro-male (76%!!) and pro-white (85%!!) approach.
For context, the US is <50% male, and about 60% white.
https://www.acslaw.org/judicial-nominations/diversity-of-the...
... from a specific federal aid program.
Meanwhile the farmers in the stories are complaining to politicians likely owned by the entities who benefit from the oligopolies.
Yup, they get lip service and a promise, in return they get votes, and nothing changes because farmers don’t vote for their interests.
class and nationalist politics is really all there is at the end of the day, huh.
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.
I am not sure we are going to see anything change in the next few years.
Cartels.
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.
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=t_N3g986TiE
What is wrong about the top two comments? They seem pretty accurate.
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.
So many people voted for Trump, like farmers, when it was so obviously against their own interests that many people are enjoying the schadenfreude when these people realize that Trump is also hurting them, not just the people they wanted him to hurt. It is like telling someone not to touch the stove because it is hot and they do it anyway.
Generic anti-market criticisms from the quoted, without a lot of specifics…
Is it just a price issue? External completion? Increased input prices?
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)
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.
Seemed highly specific to me. Monopolization of suppliers who lobby for bailouts instead of change, knowing that bailout money goes straight from farmers to the suppliers.
I think the truth is we have too many farmers and instead of letting the market decide which ones continue and which ones fold, we subsidise to keep them all going. It's been happening for decades and needs to change. It'll be a painful change but necessary for a healthy farm market where the farmers that remain can produce plenty and get good prices for their crops.
I did some computer work for a large family farm in north east Colorado. A letter from the state was framed and hanging next to the desk. It showed a list of family-owned farms in the state and how many sections (640 acre lots - 1 mile square) each farm had in CRP (Conservation Reserve Program), which is the state of Colorado paying farmers not to farm, and how much money they received. This family farm was at the top of the list, receiving millions of dollars each year to not farm.
I have no pity for the American farmer.
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
Turns out trade wars are not that easy to win.
There's a video of this meeting. All those farmers getting down on their knees to pray for a federal bailout.
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.
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-agric...
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.
End NAFTA. Our government neither works for nor answers to us.
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.
> 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.
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.
Guess what name never once shows up in this piece.
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...
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?
Yeah they lose money on every bushel, but make it up in volume...
Land value has very little to do with how productive it is.
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.
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.
It’s not secret , it’s published widely and I read it often. Here’s an example of how much cheaper Canadian farmland is an American farmland.
And your farmland is not only cheaper, but it’s more productive.
You can’t compare the United States and Canada because we have different political systems. I mean, you guys get free healthcare. You can probably afford to buy land because you’re not spending all your money on outrageous insurance premiums, or out-of-pocket cost from going to the doctor.
https://www.producer.com/news/prairie-farmland-still-a-barga... Western Canadian farmland is cheap when compared to Europe and the United States, says the director of an investment fund with offices in Calgary and Toronto.
> Here’s an example of how much cheaper Canadian farmland is an American farmland.
Western Canada, maybe. Now try Ontario... It makes the I-states look like the land is being given away. Still, not hearing of any looming farm bankruptcies in Ontario.
> And your farmland is not only cheaper, but it’s more productive.
It's almost as though comparative advantage is a real thing, and nations can be better off overall through specialisation and open trade.
> You can probably afford to buy land because you’re not spending all your money on outrageous insurance premiums, or out-of-pocket cost from going to the doctor.
But: isn't he paying for all that in his taxes instead of directly?
Apparently, Bill Gates is one of the largest private farm land owner - https://landreport.com/farmer-bill-gates
The article is not talking about people who own large tracts of farmland; it's talking about monopolies controlling the supply of seeds, chemicals, and fertilizers. At any rate, if Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland, that means he owns a bit less than three one-hundredths of one percent of the US's 880,000,000 acres of farmland.
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 ).
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
> 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:
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashburton_Downsbut 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/Rose_Porteous
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...
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.
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.
> “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...
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.
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.
I cannot comprehend the style how politician campaigns are funded in US. Especially corporate sponsorship of politicians. It basically seems as an ordinary corruption to me.
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.
Or you can at least look for viable 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.
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
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
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.
All the subdivisions in Texas that have “ranch” in the name are that way for a reason
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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-t...
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/indias-dairy-revo...
There are some large dairy cooperatives in the US. I'm not sure how healthy they are as an outsider, in general I think agriculture is a good place for cooperatives.
It looks like Michigan's milk producer cooperative is selling in some partnership with India’s Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Limited (GCMMF).
https://www.michiganfarmnews.com/mmpa-to-make-milk-for-world...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darigold
> There are some large dairy cooperatives in the US
They don't tend to own processing infra, though that is slowly starting to change. And some of them line "Land o Lakes" are cooperatives in name only, and are very abusive to small farmers, because they can only process at 1k+ head sizes.
> It looks like Michigan's milk producer cooperative is selling in some partnership with India’s Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Limited (GCMMF)
Yep! Because India can't export Indian milk to the US without tariffs, and American cows are fed meat, so Amul decided to corner the vegetarian milk market by making the cooperative deal with MI.
Blume Ventures had a good write-up on this I need to find.
>The economics of American farming fail because 70% of profit is retained by the processor
The above sounds like a very Marxian criticism though, essentially Marx's exploitation thing, only instead of considering a proletariat and capital owners, small capital owners and big capital owners who are middlemen and able to lock down the ability of the small capital owners to sell their goods.
Has Amul not been completely captured by the BJP at this point though?
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.
Another issue might be that PDS was abolished in the 80s (utility stores at provincial level are similar but not the same)
I believe arhatiya also play a similar role in Pak as in India. I wonder if Modi’s farm bill affected these coops.
Nope. The MSP laws didn't affect cooperatives. The issue is, a common side hustle Punjabi, Haryanvi, JK, and Himachali farmers do is import MSP crops from states like MP or Bihar and then sell it to the MSP broker in Punjab, Haryana, JK, or Himachal. As trucking in India is largely consolidated in PB/HR/HP/JK it makes it easier for larger farmers in those regions to build the supply chains needed to do an MSP arbitrage.
Essentially, instead of farming, you become a commodity broker (arhatiya)
This is why you didn't see similar protests in other states in India that also have MSP like Kerala or Gujarat, because they don't have the same logistics chain (otherwise they'd do it as well).
> Another issue might be that PDS was abolished in the 80s (utility stores at provincial level are similar but not the same
Oof, that is not good. India has shown that a PDS style model can work nowadays thanks to digitization. Pakistan needs to redeploy the PDS system if the ag economy is to recovery, especially after the floods.
> arhatiya
Yep, but they tend to be in those commodities that aren't covered by a cooperative.
Was thinking more of arhatiya as short term lender but that tracks
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In theory I agree, but it's starting to feel like we need to say "society is not a suicide pact".
I agree and it would be applying the golden rule because ultimately it would benefit these communities.
> being in a society means having a safety net.
The people in rural areas strongly disagree with that statement.
But perhaps even if true, it doesn’t invalidate the safety net, if we are a society that tries to put a net under people.
It’s going to ultimately hurt the US. If our companies don’t have to compete or innovate, the rest of the world will outcompete and out innovate us. We will be the backwater refusing to get with the times.
A few will get to reign in hell, or retreat to their bunkers, or leave with their riches.
I think we need a new word or a new definition for monopoly. Even concentration - whether it is a monopoly or oligopoly or not - is a problem. It’s how Walmart gets away with squeezing farmers and demanding total compliance from them while refusing shipments arbitrarily, keeping them in permanent dependent serfdom.
Trump voters dealing with trump tariffs.
I want this to be more nuanced, but that's it.
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I still say Blackwater, instead of whatever name change they’re on currently.
I knew what the commentator meant despite knowing about the Bayer merger
If they did, they would vote to kick it even harder. Farming in America is a giant grift off the taxpayer, from ethanol to tariffs to family farm tax exemptions.
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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.
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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".
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.
> 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-mo...
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-ways-trump-admin...
Crazy how “chainsaw”, “musk”, and “revved” don’t show up anywhere in the article.
You’d think people this angry would at least have a basis for it!
> in the article
Why on earth would it be? You've lost the thread, this is about djinnandtonic's claims, not what the article says. Here, a quick recap:
1. djinnandtonic: I have no sympathy for the complaining farmers in this article, who are probably ones that cheered a separate chainsawing-bureaucrats event. They willfully chose a cruel mess.
2. NotGMan: Comparing the misfortune of good farmers to the misfortune of bad bureaucrats is unfair.
3. Terr: djinanndtonic wasn't comparing the two groups, djinnandtonic was using that event to to argue that rural farmers' voted for the mess they find themselves in.
4. Kulahan: Which line says farmers are voting that way?
5. Terr: djinanndtonic's line right here about the chainsawing-bureaucrats thing, because it's a reference to [...]
6. Kulahan: OMG THAT LINE ISN'T EVEN IN THE ARTICLE!111
7. Terr: Of course it isn't, because the article wasn't about their vote patterns, that was introduced in the HN comment that NotGMan critiqued. Here's a recap [Recursion Error Detected]
I was making a point that complaining about strawmen you invent is a waste of time.
The people who clapped as musk revved a chainsaw and then went home and complained about farm shit don’t exist. Farmers aren’t spending all day on Twitter. They don’t even know who musk is aside from the CEO of Tesla.
I apologize for throwing you for such a loop.
Google the farm bill. Farmers are most successful when they work the system for handouts. Most farming is not economically viable otherwise
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I guess that would be very typical, grabbing gov't assistance with both hands and whining about socialism the whole time
You mean explicitly stating the assistance is bad and should stop?
How will you fit that into your desperate attempt to hate?