When visiting a grocery store, we are met with an apparent multitude of choices. Meat and cheeses advertising grass fed cows, chickens and eggs labeled as free range, corn claiming incomparable freshness. In reality however, the farm to table story of local small farmers producing our food is becoming more and more a myth. Today, the four largest American agriculture companies, using a model known as industrial agriculture, control anywhere from, according to Farm Action, sixty to ninety percent of numerous agricultural markets, including soybeans, cotton, animal processing, retail grocery, and more. Absent a swift and firm congressional response, this agricultural consolidation risks destabilizing farming communities, our national food supply, and our nation as a whole.
When considering why said policies are so important, the scale of the decline in small farms ought to then first be clarified. Researchers at the Economic Research Service, another subordinate to the Department of Agriculture, marked two essential trends in American farming. First, since 1940, the number of American farms has seen a sharp and ongoing decrease, with the number recently “down 7 percent from the 2.04 million found in the 2017 Census.” Comparatively, the average farm size nearly quadrupled. What these statistics reflect is the process of consolidation, by which small farms are, through various means including mass buyouts and market manipulation, integrated into industrial agriculture farms. American agriculture has undergone a transformation, becoming larger and in the process, drastically different from our previous conceptualizations of the American farm.
This then begs the question of how industrial agriculture has managed such a takeover. The answer is vertical integration, wherein corporations have grown to, as The Guardian outlines, control the “entire production line from ‘farm to fork’, from the genetics of breeding to wholesalers in the US or far east.” Companies like Monsanto and Tyson consume all steps of agricultural production while obliterating competitors without the massive amount of capital necessary to keep up. There are a litany of tactics by which they accomplish this, one of which is purchasing the best farming equipment and then driving smaller competitors into debt when they attempt the same. These companies are also known for flooding the market with cheap crops to decrease the value of small harvests, and raising the price of patented seeds to make it more difficult every year for small farmers to regrow while maintaining their bottom line. These corporations then buy up the lands of those they drive out of business, expanding their control. Such practices don’t just undermine small farms, they actively contort the market to lower competition in the sector. A final and essential control mechanism for industrial agriculture is lobbying. With extensive funding, over $130 million in 2024 as reported by Open Secrets, given to lobbying initiatives, agribusiness has influenced policy at an expansive scale.
In many respects, this lobbying has enabled more than anything else the agribusiness takeover, creating as the American Prospect makes clear, policy failures such as “lax antitrust enforcement” and “rewarding larger operations and subsidizing cheap commodity grains”. This confluence of misappropriated regulations and legislation has all but handed monopolistic companies full power over the production chain with almost no government interference. All the while, government farm bills feed funding to these companies for each acre of land they acquire. These subsidies tend to exclusively benefit industrial agriculture, only subsidizing “major commodity crops—mainly corn, wheat, and soybeans,” according to American Prospect. This further rewards large companies for the structures only their business models have been optimized for, feeding industrial agriculture larger amounts of funding to further dismantle its smaller competitors. The devastating final effects of this practice are now plain to see, with more and more small farms forced out of business each day.
Many readers who are not farmers themselves may wonder why exactly small farms are so important for our nation and the individual American. All Americans, regardless of occupation, should be concerned about small farm decline, because small farms play a key role in all communities, and industrial agriculture causes various harms when it takes small farming’s place. An article from Futurum identifies that small farmers “strengthen the local economy, provide jobs to local people, and can even help to support local wildlife.” Though these benefits may seem immaterial, their effects and moreover, absence, are concrete. On an economic level, the chain of events following the collapse of even a single small farm has historically proven disastrous, with the previously discussed Guardian article tracking a cascade of poverty and inequality across America. “Local seed and equipment suppliers shut up shop because corporations went straight to wholesalers or manufacturers. Demand for local vets collapsed. Shops, restaurants and doctors’ surgeries closed. People found they had to drive for an hour or more for medical treatment. Towns and counties began to share ambulances.” What lies evident here is that small farms are a source of prosperity to rural communities, with countless businesses in these towns relying on small farmers as sources of external capital and patronage. With their disappearance, not only do the businesses adjacent to the agricultural sector collapse, so too do restaurants and stores necessary for thriving downtown spaces, along with crucial government infrastructure. This directly drives rural communities into poverty as industrial agriculture uses the land without patronizing and supporting local economies. The expansion of industrial agriculture has and continues to cumulatively force rural America into a state of potentially permanent secular stagnation and inequality.
What moreover makes the rural inequality facing our nation so uniquely dangerous are the political movements that have begun to spring up alongside it. As oftentimes varied and far more volatile populist movements emerge in our nation, commonalities between them appear uncertain. However, when considering both census and and economic data, a trend tracked best by the Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society emerges, with populist movements spreading most in “communities in which individual losses are strongly identified with collective losses” and being “fundamentally linked to the geography of decline; to places that, despite remaining relatively homogeneous in terms of interpersonal inequality, have witnessed considerable employment and demographic decay.” Though this characterization is by no means universal, it provides a framework to understand how many American communities have been overtaken by populist sentiments in recent years. As towns that experience the loss of each small farm as a loss for the entire community are faced with a mass decline in their fundamental source of income, some citizens turn to populist movements to channel their fury and resentment. These are the communities where disillusioned Americans raise anti-government militias and write ballots for populist leaders on the left and right, ones who all too often demonstrate little intention of solving the policy failures which produce such dangers in the first place.
This is a key indicator of how the poverty forced upon rural towns directly influences national politics, but it moreover affects both local and distant communities concerning the distribution of food itself. Due to the mass control corporations wield in agriculture, America’s food system is, according to MDPI’s Sustainability Journal, “highly centralized with only three of the fifty states producing more than 75 percent of U.S. fruits and vegetables.” Though this national network of production may be profitable, it is far from sustainable, with supply shocks threatening Americans across the nation. When small farms disappear, few direct sources of fresh food are accessible in rural communities, especially with the process of economic stagnation caused by the same disappearance. Moreover, urban and suburban populations suffer as well, with industrial agriculture companies able to raise prices for fresh foods with impunity. Considering then the impacts outlined, the pervasive rural inequality, the burgeoning populist movements, and the perpetual deprivation of nutritious food from American communities, it is apparent that industrial agriculture carries with it immense downsides.
In spite of the many negative impacts inherent to industrial agriculture, proponents and spokespeople of agriculture corporations still espouse claims surrounding the supposed benefits of industry consolidation. However, these arguments almost always prove faulty. One common claim produced by agribusiness advocates is that in a world with an ever expanding population, only the most efficient methods of agricultural production, industrial agriculture, can meet the expanding demand for food. According to Nature Sustainability’s large scale synthesis of existing evidence, “smaller farms, on average, have higher yields and harbour greater crop and non-crop biodiversity…than do larger farms.” This disproves one of the most insidious points forwarded by industrial agriculture, indicating how small farms and their sustainable methods feed more people while keeping the surroundings healthier. This additional biodiversity makes small farms even more beneficial, with GeoPard Agriculture describing how increased agricultural biodiversity results in “better crops that contain more nutrients that are needed for human consumption…” and “…food security by providing many different types of foods in a single area so that if one type of crop fails due to drought or other conditions then others will still be available for harvest.” These improvements to the productivity, nutrition, and security of small farms, outputs make them the definitively superior option for our food system.
Separate from productivity, representatives of industrial agriculture have also claimed it results in increased prosperity and market competitiveness, but so too are these claims faulty. A press release from the USDA has identified that agriculture consolidation “undermines economic resiliency and robust price competition.” By limiting the manner in which small farmers can produce a wider range of goods with varied prices, consolidation undermines the vitality and freedom of agricultural markets, further destabilizing the nation. Proponents of industrial agriculture also claim the system provides a wide range of jobs, injecting some capital into the local communities in spite of the already established loss of fundamental businesses and civilian infrastructure. However, work by journalist Carolyn Fortuna has uncovered specifically that “Areas having more small farms have lower poverty and unemployment rates, higher average household incomes, and greater socioeconomic stability.” This indicates clearly that small farms are better for not just markets at large, but also are a comparative boon to local economies that would otherwise be dominated by extractive industrial agriculture systems. In contrast, industrial agriculture, in its pursuit of maximized profits, employs and puts into local economies as little as possible. As such, even industrial agriculture’s greatest alleged contributions to American financial systems and communities prove illusory, and moreover certainly do not outweigh the other significant disadvantages wrought upon rural and national communities.
Concerning what approach is best suited for the complex challenge facing the nation, it is best to first reconsider the causes of our anti-agrarian problem itself. As previously identified, the key preconditions for the mass consolidation of agriculture started in the halls of government, with some of the most impact causes being weak antitrust legislation and enforcement, along with biased food subsidies programs. An effective government policy must work to either directly address both of these threats, or render one of them inconsequential through the resolution of the other. Notably, targeted antitrust and anti-monopoly legislation would decisively fulfill the latter requirement, both preventing further consolidation, while also punishing the larger companies that are normally paid more by the government simply for the sake of their size. Although congress has proposed a litany of different antitrust policies, the 2023 Rural Policy Action Report, put together by a vast coalition of rural advocacy groups, farmer’s organizations, and agricultural labor movements, identifies a few key policies with common mechanisms of solvency. These policies come in the form of the “Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act” and the “Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act.” These two bills, sponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker respectively, would serve as the crux of agricultural reform, beginning with the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act. This bill would begin the fight against industrial agriculture by not only limiting aforementioned consolidation techniques used by larger corporations, but also creating a commission to directly intervene in “the nature and consequences of market concentration in the U.S. food and agricultural economy.” When considering how exactly industrial agriculture undermines small farms, raising the cost of seeds and plummeting food prices to push down every small farmer’s bottom line, taking active control of the market mechanisms and concentration of key commodities is an essential first step.
With the abusive market manipulation of industrial agriculture mitigated, the next bill, the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, acts not as a vector for material change, but rather a potent preventative action in so far as that it proposes to, amongst other policies “better enable enforcers to arrest the likely anticompetitive effects of harmful mergers in their incipiency.” Along with establishing harsher violations for breaking the aforementioned regulations, this bill grants antitrust enforcers increased autonomy to challenge potentially abusive mergers. This would directly address and mitigate industrial agriculture’s attempts to further monopolize farming, and in doing so, limit the practices they have previously utilized to undermine small farms and their communities. These two essential pieces of legislation work in tandem to eliminate the largest threat to small farms today, with Klobuchar’s bill actively combatting attempts at further consolidation while Booker’s works to dismantle the fundamental tactics of control used by predatory companies. It should also be noted that although these bills do prove regulatory in nature, they are anything but an infringement on the freedoms of American markets or farmers. Rather, when considering the decrease in competition and food productivity that farm consolidation represents, they are a method to preserve the economic and social freedoms of rural and national communities. If reintroduced in the current or coming session of congress, these bills will ensure a safe environment in America’s courtrooms and markets for small farming.
It must be said that these solutions will only alleviate so much. The roots of America’s relationship with industrial agriculture go back a century, running deeper than any single policy reform could ever hope to entirely reach. But the first initiative, the first time the shovel breaches the earth, isn’t just the most difficult, it is the most essential step for our agricultural future. Should we fail to stop the collapse of our farmland, consequences will assuredly prove dire, but if we push back the march of agribusiness, we will leave coming generations a field wherein they might plant not just crops to sustain their stomachs, but prosperity to uplift our communities, brotherhood to unify our nation, and the security to safeguard our future.
