>"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?"
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.
> “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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
29 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadaround 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
I get that frustration.
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.
Is it just a price issue? External completion? Increased input prices?
Don't worry though, AI will totally make it all better. You know so because the wealthiest people in the world insist on it.
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...
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.
Weird thing to have in an article about farmers who primarily export their food.
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.
>“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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
I want this to be more nuanced, but that's it.