The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers.
They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices.
They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government.
When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to.
The whole system is broken from top to bottom.
This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?
1. Farmers vote. And, Farmers live in states where the value-per-vote is high under both state-vote balancing, and gerrymander. Farming is politically useful.
2. Food is part of national security. It's sensible to keep the sector working.
3. Consumers hate variability in food pricing. So, general sentiment at the shop is not in favour of a strong linkage of cost of production to price, and under imports, there's almost always a source of cheaper product, at the socialised cost of losing domestic food security: Buy the cheese from Brazil, along with the beef, and let them buy soy beans from China and Australia to make the beef fatter. -And then, you can sell food for peanuts (sorry) but you won't like the longer term political consequences, if you do this. See 1) and 2).
I agree with you that the food supply chain is vital to (any country’s) national security, but I don’t think anyone with any real power takes this seriously.
Not everything is about economics. As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power. Keeping food cheap serves an important political function. It also serves an important security function to keep food domestic because if you are at war with where your food is grown, you are not going to win that war.
> As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power
“One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs” [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circu...
The romans got their grain cheap from egypt.
Egypt and the north african provinces were a part of the Roman empire fairly early on. They were also some of the wealthiest and most important provinces in the Empire.
Some of them date back to 'westward expansion', where they were incentives to encourage settler immigration (e.g. Texas tax exemption from 1839). They've stayed on the books because nobody wants the trouble of suggesting their removal.
More generally, however, it's a cost that is paid to support massive efficiency gains in other sectors. Like roads, aviation or the military. The freight system particularly would be unreliable if food prices floated according to only supply and demand, due to freights vulnerability to political upheavals, militias, etc.
You can't eat private insurance.
The consequences of not being able to produce enough calories is severe. It is much better to overproduce and everyone gets fed than producing just enough and a climate event erases out 20% of our calorie production.
Your buffer here is meat. Cattle are tremendously inefficient consumers of grain. Eat your burgers in the bountiful years, then slaughter 75% of the herd in a hardship year, eat well for six months, then spend the next three years eating more grains while the herds recover.
Ethanol is another one.
That's the sensible way to do it.
Somehow I doubt that it's the way we do it... But maybe the variability is coming from world trade and developing nations.
Cattle are inefficient consumers of grain, but highly efficient consumers of grass. Most land used for pasture can't effectively be used for anything else.
Pricing anything into the cost of food would be political poison. Paying farmers to grow nothing is considered preferable to that
It's not always about price. Paying farmers to grow nothing ensures they stay open if we need them to grow something.
When I farmed we had set aside land paid for by the government. When there were predicted shortages on food in the future, we were allowed to farm that ground.
You don't want farmers going under. It just takes one bad year that way and we're all fucked. I've never lived through a proper famine, but Grandpa talked about the dust bowl and depression. It sounded fucking awful.
… but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources?
It’s doesn’t.
Agricultural subsidies in the US, and I presume most states but I’m not as well read on their policies, are a mixture of realpolitik, war preparedness, and graft.
If you are trying to square the circle, you can’t, because economic efficiency was not an input for the decisions on these subsidies.
most of the subsidies are insurance not direct payments.
because the energy states of inputs are so massively beyond ordinary bounds that distortions of unexpected kinds develop and persist in markets that otherwise appear to be straightforward? And, this is not new, but more energetic and more far-reaching than ever before. (more comments would have to chose a lens through which to postulate e.g. economic, legal, energy exchange, human nature ... etc.. ?)
Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important.
It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy.
It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live)
So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.
I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened.
Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.
Having been in the NZ ag tech industry for the last 25+ years, US subsidies and tarrifs drove a lot of innovation in NZ (also Europe) and then US manufacturers in the spaces I've been in have pretty much collapsed when faced with better tech as farmers switched to using our ( or the European) tech.
It would appear that to remain competitive they had massive consolidation, and with that an increase in animal density leading to major issues with water pollution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CraFarms
So I guess yay deregulation, now with more capitalist privatized profits with socialized costs!
Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job
I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.
Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.
~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.
Subsidies also lead to surpluses that can help buffer price shocks during supply crises; here is a recent example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01638-7
"Ag. can't just be about profit."
Somewhere off in the distance I hear billionaires laughing.
This is only important if you care about the future of humans. At least in America, attention spans have shortened, empathy has decreased, and individualism has increased. Billionaires don't care about the future beyond their own life. And unfortunately, one of the worst of them is now the head of the country.
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It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up.
i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)
Canada has a thing called "Supply Management". It means that for some agricultural industries, we limit how many people can produce, for example, milk.
This restriction keeps the price of milk stable, and high enough that farmers can make a profit. It may seem strange to some, but the goal is to ensure that we don't have to bail out our farmers.
The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out.
Canadians watch crazy things like for example the US Federal government buying millions and millions of gallons of milk, making cheese, and storing it for decades. All to reduce supply/create demand, and keep the price artificially high. I suppose one bonus is the US government gives some of this cheese to the poor.
The other crazy part is the US federal government has repeatedly bought dairy farms out, to reduce supply. Literally bought entire farms, and closed them down.
Canada wants a stable supply of milk. We don't want to rely upon a foreign power for basic food-stuffs. And we don't want to spend untold billions. Thus, supply management.
Meanwhile, the US runs around saying we're crazy commies because we have price and supply control, says free market is perfect, then spends endless billions over decades to pretend the market works.
Oh and also, the US screams about how our market isn't "open", how we unfairly manipulate the market, then... wants to inject super cheap, underpriced milk, all of the result of US federal tax dollars spending billions.
Finally, it is illegal to use growth hormones in Canada on cattle. Not so in the US. With the excess supply issues in dairy in the US, maybe the US should do the same?
There’s only two meat packers… two. Where are the cattle farmers to go? It’s like this across the industry thanks to monopolies like ConAgra, Tyson’s, etc.
Sarah Taber for the lowdown all things US Farming https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber
would this actually be enough such that farmers have to sell their land and new small family farmers cam get started?
or only a new set of bankruptcies and the same farmers stay on?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJ... was very illuminating
It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else.
Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.
Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.
I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming.
With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands.
Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.
Small farmers are not good policy despite the romance. A large farmer can afford soil investments that small ones cannot
I watched a YouTube video that made me really worried about this, hopefully there are smart people on here that can see a bigger picture.
I wonder if at some point before large corporations finish buying up the last of the family farms in America, if rural America will figure out Trump and his maga republicans were never their friends.
Don't you worry, deposed farmers (those farmers squeezed between their mega-size suppliers and mega-size customers who had to sell their farms) voted for Trump last year.
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism.
Any handouts for farmers go straight into the coffers of multinationals to pay for farm equipment, support for the locked down farm equipment, the patented seeds, the pesticides for the patented seeds and so on. The entire subsdization model is a profit opportunity for agricultural companies.
And what do those companies wnat to do? Buy up the farms and run them themselves for more profit. Because they don't have to charge the same amount to their own farms of course.
It's also why the wealthy and big companies like illegal immigration. It's an endless supply of underpaid workers who can be exploited for even more profits. Document these people and everybody's wages go up.
The only country I can think of that is really effectively managing its agriculture and food supply is of course China. China had some food shortages in the late 20th century and a result food security became a primary concern of the CCP. China has to feed 20% of the world's population and decided that food need to be plentiful and affordable. There were a seris of agricultural reforms through the 1970s to 1990s and then China used its increasing wealth to pay farmers when they had to and subsidize food when they had to to manage the supply. It's managed to the highest levels of China's government [1].
Here we have rent-seeking corporations and billionaires (eg the Resnicks [2]) where subsidies are just a wealth transfer to the already wealthy. food prices are out of control. But nobody cares because the profits have to keep going up.
[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-chall...
[2]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
Quite surprised there wasn't mention of the Trump tariffs on China causing the collapse of China imports of US soybeans, which by the way, has persisted even though the original tariffs were reduced, causing lasting damage to farmers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-pur...
I don't really like Trump, but to be fair here, China does things like this all the time. They did the same thing in Canada, because we didn't want their spy-cars in our country.
We'd really be better off if we had zero trade with them. They're poison.
Almost 78% of farmers voted for Trump [1]. These are the guys that got Trump elected. Polls show that support for President Trump among farmers remains high, hovering around 50-60%. That means these are the guys that are keeping Trump in power. When support among farmers drops to 20% level GOP legislators will feel emboldened to remove Trump from power.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...
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This isn't reddit.
Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork!
He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
> It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.
Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em!
Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.
Prices aren't everything. Excessive pesticides can make cheap produce have negative health effects and thus a worse value. Poor soil chemistry can make cheap produce less nutritious and thus a worse value.
~78% of farmers voted for him. They are directly responsible for their own outcome in this regard.
Canada supplies 75-80% of US potash imports, and potash is a non-substitutable input in agriculture; without it, crop yields drop significantly. China no longer buy soybeans from US farmers, and instead now sources from South America; they have made a token 12M ton purchase, as they promised.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/farmers-bailout-tr...
> Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.
> “So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide [My note: farmer suicides are 3.5x-4x the general population]. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.
https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/trump-election-far...
> Not only did Trump increase his support among farming-dependent counties, but more than 100 of those counties supported him with at least 80% of their vote.
This is entirely self inflicted, which to me, is wild and a case study for history. This was a collective choice, intentionally made.
Obama did not run as a progressive, lol.
Much of the rest of this is equally ahistorical. Living conditions and wages haven't gotten worse over the past 50 years.
The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
> So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country?
If there are less voters like this over time, yes, I put forth that will help the country (~2M 55+ voters age out every year, ~5k per day). Whether the country is worth saving, we can save for another thread. If someone won't change their mind, nor their vote, you've arrived at an impasse. You can only wait for time to work. Again, very unfortunate.
> The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.
"They made me do it." is not an argument. You vote for the chainsaw, you get the chainsaw. My understanding was that conservatives held personal responsibility as a core belief. Am I mistaken? Better luck next election cycle.
Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
The fix is more expensive food.
Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.
We can have our fresh family farms back, but you're paying double for your food. We have the system we have because people value cheap/affordable over everything, regardless of what they upvote on the internet.
Europe has a very robust, high quality and cheap food system.
Food is extremely high quality, environment is managed and wealth is distributed with support for small farmers.
High quality food is a fraction in Europe of what you pay in the US.
There is additional cost to taxpayers of Europe but US taxpayers are paying a ton for the US system too but just getting worse outcomes.
This can be done.
Paying double for food is a great idea until you realize that now we need to subsidize everyone else just so they can eat.
This is true to a degree, but, if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.
I guess you could say this raises prices, but on the flip side, small farm prices could start to come down if they were more viable.
Dang. What are the good options here (without throwing people under the bus)? IMHO, the patents on seeds has been an immense pain to the midwest and should be made void with a phase out plan that starts with the most common seeds (which are causing legal havoc by mixing into neighboring farms via wind).
Can you elaborate on the "immense pain"? I don't disagree that monopolies in big AG are a huge problem, but last time I saw someone make this point, I looked into it, and there were relatively few cases of big AG suing small farmers over stuff like this. My understanding of one of the main cases that gets referenced in these discussions was where a farmer bought roundup ready seed, promised not to use it to breed, per standard EULA, then bred with it, and intentionally selected offspring to breed further which showed the roundup ready trait. Am I missing something?
Which patents in particular are you concerned about?
> it usually just ends up in the pockets of […] Monsanto
Who? Monsanto closed up shop and sold off its assets to Bayer and BASF many years ago.
The New York Drought is real.