Three farmers on monopolies and mismanagement in U.S. agriculture
144 comments
·September 10, 2025rossdavidh
9rx
> 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.
non_aligned
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.
runako
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.
taxcoder
Because no farmer ever will tell you he had a good year. He should have sold a month earlier than he did, or held on a week longer. Just the way it is, I guess.
In my business I see their books. Good years and bad years. Some things are more volatile - dairy can swing between losses and significant profits. Layers are pretty steady if you are on a contract, as long as you don't get the avian flu. Produce farmers rarely have a loss year, but their high income years are generally not as high as crop farmers, who sometimes do show a significant annual loss. More risk = more reward.
The last few years have been pretty good overall, for my clients.
9rx
> 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?
I honestly have no idea. Three years ago in particular is when the perfect storm lead to historically high commodity prices. If that's what they consider the worst time in agriculture history, I have no understanding of where they are coming from. The problem right now is that the input costs are still trying to act as if it is still three years ago, which is a problem, but the cure for high prices is high prices. I see no reason to think that will last.
As suggested before, it is likely that they are overleveraged and the loss of profitability coupled with higher interest rates is what is killing them. That's the trouble with trying to be a mid-sized player.
dmoy
The comments/narrative in TFA don't line up with FRED. 2022 was like 3x more profitable overall compared to 2016, and 2023 wasn't much worse. It's definitely coming back down.
From TFA though, 2400 is like 2x-2.5x median farm size. That's not a small farm size. It's not a massive corpo farm, but it's not a small farm. So the segment quoted in that article might be under some pretty specific pressures (other commenters alluded to - they may have bought some very pricey equipment during good years - an actually small farm will get by on shittier equipment or just rent for a brief harvest)
sonofhans
My dad told me about _his_ dad painfully learning the same lesson in the 1930s. So it goes.
ikiris
Farmers that learned the lesson didn't have their kids go into farming.
JamisonM
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.
FollowingTheDao
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.
9rx
> You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?
I'm just not sure how else you go from some of the most profitable years in agriculture history to bankruptcy in the span of a year or two. Vendor prices have not yet come back down in line with reality, nobody is going to question that, but, as they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. These temporary aberrations are par for the course. For what reason is there to believe that this time is different?
> There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech.
Yes, Nvidia looks quite similar in a lot of ways. But the pick and shovel makers have always been best positioned to take advantage of gold rushes. That isn't unusual.
> And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up?
I'm not really sure how this applies in any way, but especially because you don't really have to compete for customers in commodities. A commodity implies that you have automatic customers. It is not like you have to try and convince users to use your product over Google's.
gjsman-1000
This sounds like victim blaming.
sagarm
When other businesses can't hack it, we let them go bankrupt and do something more productive. Why do farmers get treated any differently?
xwolfi
Sometimes "victims" have been looking for some consequences for quite a while. Poke a bear long enough to be hurt, don't be surprised people blame you, "the victim".
bryanlarsen
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.
Retric
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.
rybosome
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.
Terr_
> 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, staples with long shelf-lives, not cash-crops for export, or quick-spoiling luxuries.
Are there any stats that might confirm/disprove that? Because if most those small farms are busy with pistachios or asparagus, then there's a problem with the metaphorical safety net.
runako
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.
throwawaysleep
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?
jay_kyburz
I'm no expert in the field, but if asked, I would prefer thousands of small farms protecting our food security rather than a handful of companies too big to fail.
When you have more diversity, I imagine you would get more resilience, more competition, and market forces work properly.
(pun intended)
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skellington
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!
pfdietz
No-till agriculture that uses herbicides to keep the weeds under control is better for the soil.
ameliaquining
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?
runako
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.
krainboltgreene
> 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!
Animats
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.)
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runako
> 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.
SpicyUme
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.
brewdad
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.
runako
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.
throwup238
Only about 20% of corn and 40-45% of wheat is exported. Since a lot of the rest goes to animal feed either directly or as distillers grains (waste product from ethanol/biofuel production that is still edible), it could definitely impact food security here in the US.
The complicating factor is that those grains are the feed for the last stage in beef production, with about half of all US agricultural land going to pasture for the previous stage. Eliminating those grains could significantly impact how much food the rest of the land can actually produce.
DrewADesign
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.
runako
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?
FollowingTheDao
Maybe we should nationalize farms so no one has to be hungry?
harimau777
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.
runako
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.
Cody-99
>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.
runako
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.
bfdm
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.
runako
I get that aspect. My assumption is that due to scale, location, etc., a farm that transitions from its current owner to a different owner will still be a farm with (possibly the same) employees. I don't see 30% of the farmland in Arkansas (assuming a foreclosure rate that high) suddenly becoming new-build city centers, or factories, or suburbs. It works as farmland, someone will probably buy it to use as farmland.
I don't see why it's strategically important to the US taxpayer that one millionaire own it vs a different millionaire (or corporation).
mlinhares
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".
throwawaysleep
Family farming is just a welfare grift at this point.
legitster
The entire commodity farming industry is built around exporting en masse to developing countries. In very few industries does it make sense to export industrial inputs at dollars on the ton to places like China.
It's a miracle of technology that it's even possible. Let alone the government subsidies, nitrate imports, immigrant labor, and major corporate consolidation that it requires.
Needless to say, this current administration is the perfect storm of every policy needed to destroy this domestic industry.
duxup
>"They all tell me they’re aware of a monopoly problem, and they don’t deny it exists. But they do nothing. Instead, we get bailouts and the money slips right out of our hands and into the big corporations we owe the money to — the monopolies. Meanwhile, those same corporations lobby for us to get the bailouts. Get it?"
I get that frustration.
thayne
It seems like this is becoming a problem across a lot of industries. At least oligopolies.
estearum
Almost as if capital naturally accrues to capital... hmm...
If only these people would vote for folks who stand a chance of adding friction to this process.
thayne
Unfortunately, from what I've seen the only candidates who seem legitimately interested in solving the problem don't stand a chance of getting elected, because they don't belong to either of the major parties.
missedthecue
I don't think capital naturally accrues capital. Look at any country that experimented with "land reform", i.e. taking land from capitalists and distributing it to the workers. I'll save you the wikipedia read. Production collapses, less is sold, less is earned, people become poorer. Capital is destroyed.
fungi
[flagged]
like_any_other
Yeah, it's a mystery why they don't vote for those folks...
The Biden Administration Is Still Banning White Farmers From Federal Aid - https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/20/the-biden-administratio...
duxup
Meanwhile the farmers in the stories are complaining to politicians likely owned by the entities who benefit from the oligopolies.
reactordev
Yup, they get lip service and a promise, in return they get votes, and nothing changes because farmers don’t vote for their interests.
cosmicgadget
I am not sure we are going to see anything change in the next few years.
FollowingTheDao
Cartels.
nromiun
Turns out trade wars are not that easy to win.
MattDamonSpace
Generic anti-market criticisms from the quoted, without a lot of specifics…
Is it just a price issue? External completion? Increased input prices?
yepitwas
One key claim appears to be that there are so few buyers for their products, and sellers of their inputs (and, speculation on my part, those are maybe sometimes the same parties) that “magically” the numbers always work out that their costs shoot up any time their income does, so their margins always have them right on the edge of failure.
(I don’t know how true this is)
Fade_Dance
It's somewhere in the middle. Ex: there isn't a literal potash or nitrogen monopoly, since it's a worldwide market. There is arguably an oligopoly on some levels, and then at the producer level you can see some OPEC style arrangements.
They are at the bottom and the players above them have leverage on every level. Unfortunately the way for them to gain power at the base level is to consolidate and grow - agriculture mega-farms - but that's something there also strongly fighting against.
Ultimately smaller farmers probably need to be some sort of protected class, which they already sort of are, but not to a proper extent to ensure their survival as they argue. This is the state of things in many countries in the world now, which is something that they see and accept but do not necessarily like, but that won't change policy in regards to Indian dairy Farmers or what have you so there's little prospect except frustration. Even in aggressive trade negotiations with tariffs flying over the seas at full bore, things like fishery rights and such often turn out to be the most steadfast holdouts. Not easy to change.
Or perhaps the trend of consolidation will simply continue, and there is an imminent wave of small farm bankruptcy.
kulahan
Seemed highly specific to me. Monopolization of suppliers who lobby for bailouts instead of change, knowing that bailout money goes straight from farmers to the suppliers.
alephnerd
I've posted a similar article on HN about the dairy industry [0] - the economics are the same.
ggm
I have massive sympathy with the farmers, and farming communities. So if I ask if they "should" have more rights than say hired agricultural workers regarding the value of their labour, and their exposure to risk, it doesn't mean I think what's happening is good, or fair.
I am sceptical farmers have any specific quality distinct from all other labour, exposed to monopoly capital. There's a long history of reverence for the keepers of the land, on left and right, and there have been specific political carve outs for farmers, good and bad from the left and right.
They were lied to, capturing their votes, and now suffer the consequences. There's also a "dis-intermediation" element to this, structural efficiency drives are squeezing their margins which matter for longterm resilience.
Food is strategic. I think it should be managed as a strategic asset more than for its balance of payments impact. Life on the land is hard. We should be kinder, but then, so should farming communities, voting for liars.
jbm
I think one of the more interesting stories about this that is being missed is the comments being left under videos related to this.
I legitimately don't know if they are bots (because the comments are all too similar) or if they are the just sneering Redditors en masse. I can certainly imagine both scenarios, although I'm going to guess it is more likely to be bots.
Two examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYtabeCROY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_N3g986TiE
UltraSane
What is wrong about the top two comments? They seem pretty accurate.
robocat
Middle of the value chain: getting profits relentlessly squeezed if you're inbetween powerful players.
Farmers have no monopoly power (and any collision would be difficult or illegal).
Amazing to read it so clearly - although we see in other industries.
seatac76
Bloomberg did a piece on Iowa having water issues due to Big Ag. The video was eye opening https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-03/big-agric...
Animats
There's a video of this meeting. All those farmers getting down on their knees to pray for a federal bailout.
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.