The State of Farming in America

This is a guest post from Theophanes Avery. See their blog here for more on homesteading and raising chickens! www.talesfromthebirdello.com

It’s a bleak time to be a farmer in America, the industry is at its lowest since the 1980’s and it seems as if things are only getting worse. With the average age of farmers being a whopping fifty-nine years of age, and the industry adopting increasingly destructive policies, farmers are leaving the business at a record rate. Most of the Old Timers leave without having any younger generations take up their work, often not because of lack of interest but because younger generations literally can’t afford to. New farms are increasingly impossible to start and the very food we depended on since our country first began is now being outsourced like every other commodity. Times are so tough that after four years of plummeting milk prices dairy farmers are seeing a disturbing increase in suicide rates. But it wasn’t always this way and it doesn’t have to continue being so. Most of the problems these farmers face are at the feet of political policy that has left them behind in the interests of big business.

In order to understand this we have to first have to have a basic knowledge of how industrial farming has changed the agricultural landscape. Before industrial farming most farms were very small, feeding only a family or two, and they were exceptionally abundant. Innovation was often the key to success and monoculture and monopolies were unthinkable concepts.

But then industrial farming came along. With the advent of antibiotics, electric incubators, artificial lighting, and pre-made feed, it became far easier to keep large amount of animals in one much smaller space. Crops, which used to be exceptionally varied on each homestead, soon became singular crops, pumping out a vast amount of only one product. In the beginning these all seemed like good things as farmer’s prospered with the higher production rates.
However today the entire system is more or less rigged so that the farmers themselves are doing most the work with the least amount of pay. In fact in 2017 only 50% of farms made any profit at all. The other half worked for free or worked themselves into debt. There are several complicated reasons for this. The first is that industrial farming has created a monster – now farmers are forced to produce as much as possible in as little as a time as they can manage. This may be beneficial to other factory made commodities but fresh food is perishable and the people who buy it only buy a certain amount. Producing higher yields can actually cost a farmer money in the long run as no one’s going to buy the excess which still took time and resources to produce.

This issue is compounded when the market is flooded because then the prices for things like milk get cheaper and farmers get paid even less. There used to be measures in place to make sure this didn’t happen, that food itself always maintained a steady price, but these laws protecting producers either expired or were completely rewritten or abandoned in recent years. Not surprisingly this has caused a lot of produce to start being imported from other countries for cheaper. Recent tariff wars created an antagonistic market for those attempting to do likewise and sell their products overseas.

Near-Monopolies are also a big problem. There are only four main slaughterhouses in the US that will buy and redistribute meat from farmers to sell to groceries and fast food markets. These four slaughterhouses all have their own territories meaning that if you are a farming in a particular location you basically only have one choice. This has badly tilted the entire industry against innovation. Farmers are forced to use the chicks or animals the slaughterhouses provide and grow them out on as little feed as possible. If the slaughterhouses take a disliking to one farmer or another they’re not beyond selling sub-par chicks or fudging the data from the weigh-ins so the farmers get paid less. Other accusations are rife and farmers are frequently afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation from their one and only buyer. Again, rules providing protection from these practices were rolled back in 2017 in the GIPSA — short for the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration. They were subject to the demand lobbyists sent by the meat packing industries themselves whose only interest was to make sure their operations were easier and they couldn’t be sued as easy. This was mirrored in plant based farming where big agribusiness strong armed most to use only Monsanto seeds. Farmers who refused started to get sued by Monsanto itself whenever GMO plants were found on their farms – usually blown in by the wind from surrounding farms.
Life on small homesteads also is becoming more difficult with the passing of more regulatory laws. In the past homesteaders could buy antibiotics, wormers, anti-coccidia agents, and other medications from their local feed stores to administer to their flocks and herds as they saw fit. This was a valuable resource because most vets have no idea how to treat farm animals. Lobbyists had laws passed to make many of these necessary medications illegal over the counter without a veterinary prescription. They sold this to the people by saying it was to prevent big agriculture from feeding antibiotics to their animals to make them grow bigger faster. The reality was this law does exactly the opposite, it leaves antibiotics in the hands of only the biggest of farming operations, the ones who can pay to have vets brought in to write the scripts. This has had devastating effects. Coccidia, which is a problem throughout most farm animals and can kill very quickly, is now afforded no control unless you are fortunate enough to have a vet which are very hard to find, especially the more rural your area is. The same goes for diseases and injuries that may require antibiotics and the hardest hit of all these particular groups have been bee keepers. Hives have traditionally always been tended and medicated by keepers because there’s less than a handful of vets in the country that would have any idea what they’re looking at when it comes to treating insects! Now they have been cut off from their one form of health maintenance.

And a cherry on top of the cake is often pet owners making laws that have bad consequences to farmers. One of the hottest state issues over the past few years have been dog laws that require all dogs to be housed indoors at night or during any particular weather. This is a very bad policy for Livestock Guardian Dogs who live their entire lives with a flock or herd of animals, protecting them at night from predators, and probably never going inside a human household. These dogs are made for bad weather and would much prefer to stay outside with their sheep and cow friends than be lavished upon indoors and they’re not the only dogs who’d rather have a job than a life of luxury. These laws could potentially also effect hunting and working dogs kept and bred outdoors. It’s a sad case of allowing people who have no idea make up policies about what constitutes as humane treatment. It may come from a good place but ultimately it’s hurting the innocent.

We are standing at a turning point. If we do not start listening to farmers and their needs we risk having all of them go out of business and getting almost 100% of our food supply from other countries. This makes no sense what-so-ever to be dependent on other countries when our own has millions of acres of arable land and yes, even willing people to tend it who really can’t because of economic reasons. We can change things to make sure this doesn’t happen but we better start acting quick because farming in America is dying fast.