“I’m a small farmer, and I’m tired of listening to big corporate operators complain that they’re not making money.
“They say margins are tight. They say the numbers don’t work. They say farming is getting harder every year. What they don’t say is that they’re the ones driving a lot of those problems.”
That’s from an Illinois farmer. I can think of a dozen more who’d agree. And a dozen others who wouldn’t. And an economist or two who would say it’s complicated.
Those economists don’t expect 2027 net farm income to improve. University of Illinois ag economists said revenue will be slightly higher but costs will be more than slightly higher. Whether you rent or own ground makes a difference, but that math is still tough.
The reality is that scale has its advantages, especially in periods of high cost. Volume discounts exist on seed, fertilizer and chemicals. Equipment companies offer multi-unit discounts. Scale matters, and it’s why farmers have tried banding together over time into co-ops, buying groups and more, with varying degrees of success.
For sure, it’s easy to think of big farmers as the enemy.
What’s too big? An honest farmer once told me, “Anybody bigger than me.”
Policy not for the farmers
Over time, federal farm policy has encouraged larger operations. Payments are structured for larger operations and across multiple entities. D.C. lobbyists drive many of the policy conversations — and the resulting decisions.
Now eight years out from the last farm bill, we’re stuck in a cycle of partisan politics that won’t move legislation forward. Then they crank out disaster payments, which are definitely for policy disasters, not weather disasters.
Five ad hoc payment programs total $105 billion over eight years:
- $23 billion in 2018 Market Facilitation Payments for the first trade war
- $31 billion in 2021 for COVID-19 losses
- $31 billion in the 2024 American Relief Act
- $12 billion in 2026 bridge payments
- $8 billion in Harvest Fuel Relief
Payments roll out, farmers collect them, input prices remain high, rents go up, and the money flows right through the farmers’ hands back to the companies with K Street lobbyists.
So the farmer is still just as bad off, but those companies that lobbied are doing great, thanks for asking.
It’s a fundamentally broken system that favors a sliver of farmers who function as a pass-through entity. And it’s become all too easy for the “save the farmer” message to be used and reused by companies and organizations in D.C., as they run to Congress or USDA to demand more payments.
I spoke with a young farmer this fall who’s rented several hundred acres for a few years, carefully building up the soil. The owner passed away and his heirs hired a farm manager who wants to increase cash rent by 25%. If the farmer agrees, he loses $100,000 a year. If he doesn’t, someone else will pay — likely someone who can average out the loss over several thousand other acres.
‘We’re all cooked’
We can argue that’s just the way it is. That’s capitalism. And that’s true.
But is that what we want? Farms get bigger and bigger. The wealth of the land transfers out of the community. Young farmers find another job. People continue to leave production agriculture.
“We’re all cooked,” the young farmer told me. “We want to farm but we don’t want to be at the complete mercy of the bank and our landlords.”
And not everyone wants more acres. More seasoned farmers have told me of turning down extra ground because they already have more than enough to keep them busy. They want to run a tractor, not manage widgets from an office.
I’d argue it’s time for a different approach to farming, driven by farmers themselves.
Nobody’s coming to save us. The federal government is not interested in sweeping policy change. It can’t even pass a farm bill three years past its due date. It’ll be up to us to figure out how to raise food on the land we have for the people who want to buy it. Maybe not via a barge. Maybe for our neighbors.
Take that young farmer I spoke to earlier. He’s considering a direct-to-consumer crop. That foreign ground beef the federal government promised certainly boosted demand for local beef like his.
But what do you think? How do you build a different approach to farming? What do you want agriculture to look like? And how will it provide for your family today and 20 years from today?
Help isn’t on the way. We are the help, and we need to choose our own path and drive our own change — or we may find ourselves on a road we don’t like.
Comments? Email holly.spangler@farmprogress.com.