So There’s Very Little Food Production in American Farms

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Periodically, the US Congress manages to pass a big, fat, complex piece of legislation known as the Farm Bill. It hasn’t exactly been able to do that lately, settling for temporary extensions to the last overhaul from 2018. That bill hands out buckaroonies to the US farms. Guess who gets the cash?

Did you guess small and mid-size farms that both struggle to survive AND produce food Americans can actually eat? Ho ho ho. Have you learned nothing about the United States of America? Of course that’s not who get the handouts.

DID YOU GUESS WEALTHY FARMS WHO PRODUCE INDUSTRIAL COMMODITIES LIKE CORN AND SOYBEANS?

Of course you did. Because you are slowly or very rapidly catching onto the American reality that the big fat corporations are busy crushing the small and little guys into nonexistence with the enthusiastic help of the US government. The big fat corporations that don’t produce food for Americans.

So what’s going on here? What fresh torture are the big guys foisting on farming in America?

Sadly, I cannot give you a full answer to that question because really there are too many exquisitely painful things big corporations are doing to squeeze family farmers on the one hand and then stretch them like they’re on the rack on the other hand. It would take too long to list them all and be too dispiriting for you to read.

So we’ll just hit a few highlights relating to the actual lack of food for Americans produced in American farms.

First, there’s about a billion acres of farmland in the US. That’s a lot of farmland. But there are actually relatively few areas that can sustain themselves with food they grow nearby. Food production in El Paso, Texas? Not really. Las Vegas, Nevada? Um, not so much.

Salt Lake City, Utah? Sustaining itself with local farms? Not really its thing. Phoenix, Arizona? Got other things on its mind. Albuquerque, New Mexico? Well, there are farms in New Mexico but almost none of what they produce stays in New Mexico.

In fact, New Mexico has to import almost everything its residents eat. Chances are good that’s true for where you live as well. In America, large farms have gobbled up about 42% of that billion acres, ~420 million acres. Large farms are rewarded by the federal government for growing corn, soybeans, hay, wheat, and cotton. These crops are not grown for food but as commodities for: export, animal feed, biofuels, high fructose corn syrup and other ultra-processed ‘food’ additives, and textiles.

On the opposite side of the scale, 42% of the farms in the US are small family farms. But they only have 2% of the land. The small family farms tend to produce food for Americans – things like fruits, vegetables, nuts. Factory and commodities farms account for only 2% of the farming population but have almost half the land.

So there are lots and lots of small farmers making 80K a year to feed America. Larger farms producing non-food commodities make on average 7 times that. And the mega-corporations that control the markets for farming ‘inputs’ (fertilizer, equipment, seeds, etc.) make billions.

We can parse the statistics another way. About 70% of the actual farmers in the country are small and mid-size farmers. They control about 8% of the land and produce things like fruits and vegetables that can be (and often are) consumed locally in the region. Farms over a thousand acres (a thousand acres!) only constitute about 9% of the farmer population but they control more than half the farmland in the country and produce items that people don’t eat.

This disparity is a result of US government policies that took off during the 1990s.

For one thing, free trade mantras made it easier for America to import its fruits and vegetables. Which it does to a growing extent every year. Statistics vary but America imports about 35% of its vegetables (excluding potatoes, sweet potatoes and mushrooms). And the US imports as much 63% of its fruit! In other words, your access to and ability to eat fresh, local fruit has halved since 1990. As for vegetables, America used to import less than 10% of what it consumed!

To be fair, part of the increase in imports due to free trade has to do with American consumers being able to eat fruits and vegetables that once were out of season and unavailable when the US relied almost exclusively on US production.

But the other half of the policy equation has to do with the neoliberal economic mantra that it is stupid to produce things that people need and want, and that the only things that should be produced are those that create excess profits for a few savvy, ruthless, money-accumulation-obsessed mofos. That would be the ‘free’ market except that it’s so very expensive for the government, small businesses like family farms, consumers, the planet, wildlife, and, you know, humanity.

So here we are, with a lot of rural areas dependent on a farm economy. But the big players who control the farm economy are not dependent on those rural areas. They have no reason to care about the rural communities that need them. Hell, they have no reason to care whether any food is produced in America at all. If mass starvation becomes more profitable – well so be it.

Nobody said capitalism owed anybody the right to eat!

It seems small family farms that grow fruits, vegetables, and nuts have to diversify to survive. Give tours. Offer self-pick packages for visitors. Make beer. Or jam. Or olive oil. Upsell.

This is not necessarily a bad thing if consumers are able to afford the upsold products. And the government does provide some assistance for such diversification via the Value Added Producer Grants program administered by the USDA. But…the problem is that getting this assistance is so cumbersome. It’s often not worth it for even a successful small or mid-sized family farm to try.

It’s easy for the big guys to corporatize getting money from the feds; they can afford the paperwork and then some. But for farmers who are working night and day to keep the farm itself going, the cost of diverting resources to go through a cumbersome and highly competitive grant process is enough to make the program’s benefits not all that enticing. A successful grant application may require hiring a professional grant writer. If a farm can hire a professional grant writer – it probably doesn’t need the grant that much. The money for small farms helps – but not enough to make a dent.

This is part of a long war against rural America that began in the 1980s. It’s been gradually picking up steam ever since. Rural America, ironically enough, has overwhelmingly voted for the war against itself most of the time. The result of this voting pattern is that people who are not in rural America, and who are not struggling like rural folks are, tend to despise rural voters. The people waging war against them think they’re stupid for voting for their own destruction, and the people who don’t want the war think they’re even stupider for not realizing they are voting for suicide.

It’s tempting for both sides of the political spectrum to act as though it’s just fine that rural America is slowly but relentlessly dying. But it isn’t really.

It’s heartbreaking. And needless. And it needs to be stopped.

Not just for the sake of the folks who live in rural areas. But for everyone in America. Rural America’s political decay is spreading through the nation, and its impoverishment is too.

Not to mention that, you know, communities that can’t sustain themselves with food grown nearby are veeeerrry vulnerable to federal government actions that could cut off access to or funding for food imports. The recent SNAP debacle proves that if nothing else does.

Time to get pretty fed up. And maybe start growing your own fruits and vegetables.

Tags: agriculture, government, United States