The Farm Bill Has Done More Good Than You Think

I'm still learning about the Farm Bill myself

The first time I ever read a farm bill, cover to cover, was never. Farm Bills are like, 1,200 pages long. I don’t know how many people have read one end-to-end, but I bet it's frighteningly few.

Many, on both sides of the aisle, have called for a complete overhaul of the farm bill, and some have even called for it to be scrapped completely. I can understand the frustration. The farm bill has, in some perspectives, perpetuated and even encouraged problematic forms of agricultural production. It has spent taxpayer dollars to further entrench these systems. And for my friends who are “free market” purists, the farm bill is an abomination of entitlement programs and subsidies that are distorting every market they touch beyond recognition.

At various points in my career, I’ve agreed with this take. I’ve come down against handing over taxpayer funds to a group of people who are, overall, wealthier than almost all of their fellow Americans. I’ve argued for putting additional strings on conservation dollars. I’ve argued for being choosier about the science that the farm bill helps fund. These arguments don’t go anywhere (the farm lobby has always been strong), but they’ve been satisfying to make. More satisfying, I think, than the most common alternative, which involves farm bill “reformers” encouraging congress to allocate more money to pay farmers to grow, say, rye. I guess the thinking goes that you can’t (politically) take money away from any farmer, so all you can do is extend more money to another, in the hopes of luring farmers towards… not corn and soybeans.

Personally, I don’t like that strategy. If the government wants to tell businesses how to operate, do it with regulation. Use the stick. But I find that people don’t want to talk about regulations, because somewhere along the way, everyone in and around agriculture got convinced that only carrots are allowed. The problem with this, of course, is that American ag is all full up on carrots.

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The thing about the farm bill is that it's a really important piece of legislation. For one, it funds all the work of the USDA– which includes everything from the school lunch program to the forest service to zoo inspections. It gives millions of Americans, including millions of American children, food to eat who would otherwise go hungry. That alone is enough to support it (you would think).

I was recently confronted with a good argument that the farm programs too, have done more good than many are willing to admit. Per the above, I am not an ideal person to be making that argument to, but given that they were an elder, and a very well-respected one at that, I listened. And in the end, I found the evidence compelling.

The argument goes like this. American agriculture suffers from consolidation— or the fact that more and more farmland acres are owned by fewer and fewer wealthy individuals. Many of the problems we talk about are directly or indirectly related to this trend. Young and beginning farmers can’t access land? That’s down to consolidation. Expansive farms don’t have much choice but to monocrop corn and soybeans? That’s due to consolidation. Farmers spend millions planting a crop every year, and so need the backing of the federal government to avoid going spectacularly bankrupt on the back of one bad hailstorm? That’s related to consolidation too.

Though consolidation is surely a problem in agriculture, farming is actually a much less consolidated industry than many others in America. Most sectors, whether you sell hardware or groceries, coffee or clothes, are violently consolidated. Not with a few local or regional brands dominating, but with a few global brands holding huge shares of nearly every local marketplace. Consider that there are 2,000 Home Depots locations in the U.S., 2,500 T.J. Maxx/Marshalls clothing stores, 2,700 Kroger grocery stores, and 16,000 Starbucks’, just to name a few. There are only 2,600 “urban areas” in the U.S., which means that these brands have a presence in nearly every city in the country.

The same is not true for agriculture. At the end of the day, most farmland is still owned by families, and many different families at that. “Sure,” some of you are saying, “Cargill and Purdue Pharma are also ‘family-owned.’” But the average farm in the U.S. is not a billion-dollar global enterprise. The average farm in the U.S. might be bigger than some find ideal, but there are almost no major national farming chains– no single company that owns farmland outside every major metro in the country. In that way, agriculture is much less consolidated than many other sectors.

Of course, comparing farms to these retail-level companies may seem unfair, given that farms operate primarily B2B (they sell their products to other businesses). But even there, other B2B sectors have faced much more extreme levels of consolidation– from mining to food service to manufacturing. For America to have a hundred thousand or so large, commercial crop growers does meaningfully buck the trend. Imagine if instead of all those Home Depots, there were 2,500 more local hardware stores (or probably, many times that, but smaller). Imagine instead of nearly 20,000 Starbucks’ there were thousands of additional independent coffee shops.

Naturally, some parts of agriculture are much more consolidated, and some much less. 60%+ of American grown carrots are grown and marketed by just two companies. When it comes to pomegranates and pistachios, there’s really just one company. Bill Gates, the largest individual landowner in America, may own 275,000 acres of farmland, but that is a tiny quantity in the scope of the nation’s farmland (for context, there are nearly a billion (a million million) agricultural acres in the U.S.). On the other end of the spectrum, cow-calf production has proved particularly resistant to consolidation, with nearly a million farms and ranches in the U.S. partaking in this stage of cattle production.

I say all this not to laud U.S. ag, but to point out that the farm bill has certainly been a factor in this anti-consolidation. Farm bill subsidies to farms are available (maybe a little too much so), but there is an upper limit to how much people can make. Though some ag operations are collecting $1 million+ a year in subsidies, no operation is collecting $50 million or $100 million, and most farms are collecting much less. These amounts are small potatoes to big companies, but they’re enough to keep some families on the land and resistant to buyout offers.

The point is that the farm bill encouraged farms to grow to a certain size, but then it largely helped arrest consolidation at that scale. The average farm size in the U.S. has ticked up in the last few decades, but only from the low 400 acres to the high 400 acres. It hasn’t doubled like the number of Home Depot stores have.

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When it comes to the farm bill, I cannot say that I believe the ends justify the means. I think the government should be paying far fewer people, and regulating many more. The argument I just laid out has not “made up my mind” on the subject either, but it has certainly complicated my thinking.

I am newly cognizant of the fact that the consolidation in agriculture could actually get much, much worse than it is today. It would not take long for 100,000 commercial farms to become 10,000, or 1,000. Global farming enterprises that own and operate millions of acres, whole logistics fleets, processing infrastructure, etc. exist in other countries, and they have the resources to employ private security firms (read: mercenaries) to protect their vast empires. That could be our future, and then environmental, political, and community goals around farmland would not necessitate herding farmer-cats, it would require exerting pressure on multinational companies whose true ownership or shareholders may not even be known. I don’t think that means we should continue passing farm bill legislation in exactly the same way we have, but I do think it means we need to think very, very carefully about how we proceed.

There are many who advocate for an about-face in the farm bill– ending support for commodity grain farmers and instead lavishing support on fruit, vegetable, and nut producers. I understand the instinct. However, commercial production in fruit, vegetables, and nuts is already highly consolidated, in part because they have received the least support from farm legislation. Those sectors, largely, already run in an economically sound way, and are not in desperate need of support (though I’m sure they wouldn’t say no to entitlement payments– who would?). The idea that making this switch would convert commodity grain farmers to specialty crop growers belies a lack of understanding about how costly that transition would actually be. A more likely outcome would be a nice profit boost to an already financially-secure sector, a lot of high dollar land sales (and consolidation) in the midwest, and probably no meaningful change in prices or supply at your local grocery store. This action would likely not lead to a flood of affordable fresh produce into the U.S. market or a bunch of new farmland freed up for young and beginning farmers.

So what do I think we should do? I genuinely don’t know. I also don’t know how likely it is that this congress (or any congress) could pass another farm bill. Between the right’s desperate desire to cut SNAP– a non-starter for the left– and the fact that 40 house republicans have already committed to never voting for another farm bill, the bill is trapped in a purgatory it has little chance of escaping. Maybe we’ll never have another farm bill, and maybe that’s a good thing. But maybe it’s a bad thing. The future is hard to predict.

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If you are intrigued by this argument about how the farm bill has helped arrest extreme consolidation in agriculture, hear it from the proverbial horses mouth in “The Wine of Wrath” episode 6 of The Only Thing That Lasts.