Comments
By rossdavidh 2025-09-101:578 reply 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.
> I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well
As a small commodity farmer, I don't see why it can't work well. Cash crop farming is quite well suited to small operations as far as I am concerned. The actual hard place to be is the mid-sized farmer trying to manage boatloads of debt.
The current crop price situation is not ideal, but we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years. Save during the good times to weather the bad is farming 101. I suspect, given how much equipment prices jumped in the last few years, that some of these guys thought they could get away with going out and buying a bunch of new toys and that's what really has gotten them into trouble.
By non_aligned 2025-09-102:43 Yeah, there's this whole YouTube genre of fairly unassuming farms showing off millions of dollars in the latest and greatest John Deere equipment and coming up with rationalizations about how it's going to pay for itself very soon.
But the bottom line is that there are fat years and lean years in agriculture, but if it gets really bad for a sufficient number of farmers, the government bails you out because the alternative - no food - is recognized as worse.
Thanks for weighing in here.
> we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years
Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers? From TFA:
> This is the worst agriculture economy of my lifetime over at least the past three years
Thanks again for commenting.
Lots of farmers in my area owning equipment with fresh paint (well, plastic panels these days) that can't make land payments, or at least complaining about it. The ROI on new equipment is poor and when things were booming the farmers lost discipline and the manufacturers were happy to add features and cost - fun for everyone! Chickens are coming home to roost now for a lot of folks and some of them are sharpening their pencils and some of them are in denial - in my opinion.
By FollowingTheDao 2025-09-102:362 reply You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?
There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? Well, that’s the goal, to just have a company to have a bigger person buy you up and then you go away with the money and everyone else suffers.
There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
My dad told me about _his_ dad painfully learning the same lesson in the 1930s. So it goes.
By gjsman-1000 2025-09-102:572 reply This sounds like victim blaming.
An important point that’s missed in this is that these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security. So regardless of what an analogous business in another sector may choose to do, we really want small farms to be sustainable all over the country.
By Terr_ 2025-09-103:46 > these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security
Hmm, that's only true if the kinds of crops those small farms are regularly growing are the kinds we'd want to have already in the ground as an unexpected "food security" crisis occurs. In other words, durable staples with long shelf-lives, as opposed to cash-crops for export, quick-spoiling luxuries, etc.
Are there any stats that might confirm/disprove that? Because if most those small farms are geared to pistachios or asparagus or hemp, then they aren't really serving as a national safety net.
By throwawaysleep 2025-09-102:322 reply What is the basis for the idea that small farms are vital for food security? Farms, sure. Small farms? We need low-productivity small farms for food security?
By runako 2025-09-102:55 If they are so important to US food security, why do they care what happens in China?
This is sort of a tricky way of pointing out that they largely do not grow food for the US.
By bryanlarsen 2025-09-103:152 reply Commodity production can be massively profitable. Low cost commodity producers make boatloads of cash. Saudi Aramco is exhibit A.
The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. For oil, a marginal producer is Canadian oilsands oil. It costs them $50 - $70 a barrel to produce their oil, and another $10 to ship to market. Thus the price of a barrel of oil is typically $60 - $80. If it drops below that the Canadian oilsands producers shut down, and the next most expensive producer becomes the marginal producer. (example highly over simplified)
OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits.
American farmers are not quite Saudi Aramco levels of profitable, but they are not the marginal cost producers. Large, highly mechanized farms means American farmers have extremely low labor costs compared to the rest of the world.
The last 20 or so years have been extremely profitable for American farmers.
American farmers aren’t some universal entity here. Of course it’s farm subsidies and tariffs that most heavily influence the economy reality for most American farm land, but the average small farm in the US isn’t particularly profitable. In many cases it’s closer to a hobby project than the sole income for a family.
It’s not even just a question of economies of scale, many east coast farmers grow corn just fine without any irrigation systems that’s a lot of capital you can spend on something else. Being able to lease out a tiny fraction of your land for a co-located wind farm alongside agriculture is a huge boon for many. And so it goes across a huge range of different situations.
All this variability is why you don’t see 20+% of US farmland under one giant corporation the way you see in many other industries which benefit more from economies of scale.
By JumpinJack_Cash 2025-09-1023:40 > > OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits.
What is the source for this 10 bucks figure?
By skellington 2025-09-102:163 reply Yeah but at least they're also destroying the soil to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. for no profit and as an added bonus they get to kill all those pesky insects and bees!
By pfdietz 2025-09-102:48 No-till agriculture that uses herbicides to keep the weeds under control is better for the soil.
Generally round up and similar things require less overall pesticide compared to normal crops
> to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc.
Corn and soybean seed generally has a viable period of around 2-3 years. Monsanto hasn't been in business for seven years now. Who, exactly, do you think stored their seed for so long and is now planting all that 7+ year old seed which, at this point, has a low chance of germination?
By ameliaquining 2025-09-102:171 reply Software always has much more extreme economies of scale than any physical commodity, and often has network effects on top of that. So it seems like a bad comparison. Do you happen to have any statistics comparing levels of market concentration across different kinds of physical goods?
By runako 2025-09-102:48 Sure, it would be equally difficult to start a new company making non-niche[1] t-shirts or toilet paper or plastic cups or light bulbs today.
1 - "non-niche" a/k/a the undifferentiated "standard-quality" product in the middle of the niche. This is not about someone inventing a longer-lasting light bulb or stain-resistant t-shirt. The best analogue to farmers selling commodity soybeans is something closer to plastic food wrap or aluminum foil. Not a lot of small operators playing in or entering those spaces either.
By krainboltgreene 2025-09-103:48 > Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce.
Literally every new startup is a more specific version of Excel, but also direct competitors have also been funded over the last 10 years! Same for Amazon!
By Animats 2025-09-102:40 Interestingly, California agriculture works differently. Farmers grow many different crops. Fruits and vegetables are not subsidized the way the big field crops are. Vegetable farmers tend to grow more than one crop and often switch based on demand. (Amusingly, some who switched from tomatoes to pot are switching back.) The industry is much more demand driven.
The subsidy-driven end of farming views markets for their product as an entitlement. For dairy operators, that's almost a religious belief. World School Milk Day is September 24th. They're desperately fighting against oat milk and almond milk in schools.
Then came Trump's tariffs. One of the current messes involves canola oil. Canada exported canola oil to the US, until Trump put on a tariff. So canola oil exporters want to export to China. China, in turn, wants a cut in Canada's 100% tariff on electric cars, which looks like it will happen. This in turn will reduce US car exports to Canada.
The current administration is soft on white-collar crime. That's part of the Project 2025 plan, and it's being carried out by refocusing the US Department of Justice on "violent crime". (Which is mostly the business of local cops, since the federal government only has jurisdiction over crimes related to interstate commerce.)
> 4. The grain industry must diversify.
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.
By DrewADesign 2025-09-102:172 reply Well strategically in an economic SHTF situation at least we could theoretically feed our populace with the surplus.
But we all know that realistically, at this point, the people in charge would just sell it for a pittance or dump it to manipulate market prices even if 70% of the country was starving— because this is the kind of society we’ve all created.
I hear the argument that food is different, I do. What I don't get is why any of us should care _which_ millionaire owns & operates the farm. If one millionaire isn't scaled enough to run it at a profit and has to sell to a richer millionaire or corporation, don't we still have the same net SHTF outcome?
If we develop all agricultural land while chasing dollars it cannot end well.
Of course we won't develop everything, but I'm not sure the monetary value of the land adequately prices the value of being able to grow crops. I won't pretend to have a plan, but watching very productive cropland get converted into lawns and warehouses makes me leery of how ag land is dealt with.
Here, we are basically talking about people who grow export products, not food eaten by Americans. My understanding is we could take most of these farms completely offline without much impact to US food supply (I could be wrong on this).
There appears to be a dichotomy right now between commodity farmers whose export markets have collapsed due to national policy and those who grow food for American consumption, who are not having that problem. I'm trying to gauge how important the former is to those of us who do not work on those farms.
By brewdad 2025-09-103:32 One approach I've seen, aside from zoning related laws, is to give ag land huge property tax breaks. Want to convert it to some other use? Expect a 90% increase in property taxes.
It's far from perfect since some large landowners run "hobby" farms to get the tax break while producing nothing of significance for the greater society. Other developers take the bet that they can get the land developed and sold before the biggest bills come due and it will be someone else's problem.
By harimau777 2025-09-102:351 reply To a certain degree, isn't diversifying kind of antithetical to the niche grain serves? That is to say, it seems like the whole role of grains is to be a fairly generic source of starch. I'm not sure that you could diversify much while still serving that role.
By runako 2025-09-103:12 Point taken. I think the "grain industry" has that problem, but no individual farmer is duty-bound to go 100% on grain for export every year. For example, they could grow grain crops intended for consumption in the US as a hedge against the (predictable) disruption in export markets.
>The entire agriculture industry — a bedrock of U.S. security — rests squarely on the shoulders of the American farmer.
Weird thing to have in an article about farmers who primarily export their food.
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why it should matter who owns these farms to anyone who doesn't own one. Impact to our food supply seems minimal at best. At worst, we are taking taxes from teachers to send to these rich farmers, which seems like terrible policy.
Not a an expert in this area at all, but I suspect there's an aspect here if maintaining productive capacity to replace imported food, if that became unavailable. Cursory searching suggests US food exports are similar in scale to food imports. Roughly speaking, with some adaptation that export capacity could be redirected for domestic nutrition.
If, in contrast, you let those farms and skill dry up it would be difficult to rebuild quickly.
By mlinhares 2025-09-102:10 Cos then you'll believe the story and side with the farmer that voted for the leopards and will vote for them again in the next election cos the "coastal elites are out of touch".
By throwawaysleep 2025-09-102:06 Family farming is just a welfare grift at this point.
