Thread. This one's a little esoteric, but follow if interested. @AustinFrerick, an economist & 2018 Congressional candidate in Iowa, assembled a list of Democratic Presidential candidate proposals for agriculture and rural America. A major theme is agricultural consolidation.
Democratic candidates are mostly against consolidation. We should be clear they mean, mostly, consolidation among agribusinesses: corporations that supply inputs to farmers, and buy commodities from farmers for distribution in food and fiber markets.
This is a different issue than consolidation of farming itself, the decades-long trend toward a smaller number of larger farms. The corporate power so often inveighed against on the campaign trail is central to consolidation of agribusiness, but (with some major exceptions)....
.....a much less important factor in the consolidation of farming. Farms in the United States are overwhelmingly family-owned, though many are organized as corporations for tax purposes. The two issues differ in another key way: at least in theory, agribusiness consolidation...
....is reversible. @ewarren, @BernieSanders and (I believe) a couple of other candidates have called for anti-trust action to break up recently formed agribusiness conglomerates like Bayer-Monsanto; @CoryBooker has called for a merger moratorium.
Consolidation in agriculture -- that is, of farms -- is water under the bridge, in some cases a long way under the bridge. The peak number of US dairy farms, for example, was about 3.6 million -- in the 1930s. There were fewer than 38,000 licensed dairy herds in 2018.
There are good reasons for this. If you're growing crops or producing milk for a vast American population, let alone for global markets, a couple of hundred acres or a few dozen cows isn't going to get it done. Production in quantity -- and, with respect to food safety, quality
....-- is something American farmers do spectacularly well, in large measure because agriculture's structure has evolved in the way it has. So, take campaign rhetoric about saving the small family farm with a large grain of salt, a least in this sense. With that said....
....I should make clear, first, that I'm strongly in agreement with positions @ewarren in particular has taken on wielding anti-trust law as a weapon against agribusiness consolidation, and in general sympathy with her views on contract farming (e.g. of poultry) as well.
Though I'm instinctively skeptical of the kitchen-sink approach of throwing every farm policy idea imaginable into a campaign platform, I commend @BernieSanders for giving attention to the subject. I confess to a bit of additional skepticism here,....
....because I know that the Vermont Senate delegation's work on farm policy has long been done mostly by @SenatorLeahy, not by Sanders. @amyklobuchar has some thoughts worth considering on rail and other transportation, a longstanding issue for Midwestern farmers with....
....limited options for getting crops to market. My biggest surprise in reviewing Democratic candidates' ideas for agriculture came from @JoeBiden, who has deep in his campaign web site a paragraph on developing regional food systems.
Why does this matter? Think about it: the soil in the American Midwest will grow just about anything, yet the vast majority of it is devoted to growing corn (primarily for animal feed and ethanol) and soybeans (also for animal feed along with other uses).
With enormous consumer markets within a few hours' drive, there is something wrong with this picture. The issue is agricultural diversification: reducing farmers' dependence on commodity markets by expanding the number of products they sell. The regional food systems...
....@JoeBiden's site discusses could be a highway to this destination. They would also be a more effectual way of helping new and beginning farmers establish a business than just creating another loan program; younger farmers just starting out aren't likely to prosper....
....growing a few hundred rented acres of corn and soybeans against much larger, established operations. They'd have little control over the cost of their inputs, little over who they could sell to, and none over the prices they could charge.
Diversification into other agricultural products is a path out of "commodity hell." Not at all, it is true, an easy path -- we have winters in the Midwest, and California can grow produce all year round as long as the water doesn't run out. (Although, about that...)
But Trump has blown up the export markets that supported soybean prices, corn prices are depressed even with the ethanol boondoggle that soaks up so much supply, and row crop production throughout the Midwest & South is pumping surplus nitrogen & phosphorus into rivers & lakes...
....like water out of a firehose. Any stool needs more than two legs; a more prosperous agriculture is a more diversified agriculture. Credit to @JoeBiden for recognizing this. I encourage other candidates to do so as well. That's all for now. [end]
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