Agriculture 2023: How We Got Here

Anyone involved in the good food, family farm, or environmental movements knows well the dreadful outcomes of our agriculture system. Unfortunately, many organizations document these outcomes without recognizing the basic economics or the history of our agricultural system, thereby perpetuating policy proposals based on mistaken analysis. These are often deeply funded and capably staffed organizing efforts that have influenced food and agriculture policy debate for decades and continue to do so today.

Almost 180 million acres in this country produce corn and soybeans, largely to feed livestock in corporate feedlots and CAFOs or to supply biofuel factories. These crops are almost always using seeds that are genetically modified (GMO) to resist chemical herbicides and are often grown on what USDA designates as “highly erodible land.”  Some food policy advocates frame their Farm Bill on the notion that farmers should be raising “Food, not Feed.”  They argue that farmers raise corn and soybeans because of subsidies, and if we just re-directed those payments for farmers to raise fruits and vegetables, that would be a big step in changing our agricultural system. It should be clear, however, that perishable food could not be raised on 180 million acres of land. What kind of prices would these food producers get if even a small percentage of the land were converted to fruits and vegetables?  Obviously, much lower prices than now, so it would take even more government payments to keep fruit and vegetable farmers from going under.  

Economics and history explain why much of our arable land that once grazed dairy and beef cattle on family farms, with small herds of hogs and flocks of poultry, now produces only mono-cropped corn and soybeans.  Huge fields of corn and soybeans require new technology—chemicals, GMOs, and big data—to overcome the inherently unecological nature of this system. Only focusing on subsidies—the ideal policy option of agribusiness which assures its gravy train of cheap commodities—leads us to one conclusion:  Without clarity on parity, all you get is charity.

There are many ways that agribusiness will keep their system running, except one—require that the corporate buyers of farm products pay what they should for those farm products.  That would be parity. Requiring the corporate buyers to pay a price that won’t let the buying power of farm products deteriorate with inflation is a policy reform that cannot be co-opted like so many other “solutions” to our agricultural system that is destroying family farms, rural communities, biodiversity, and our health. 

Throughout our history, farm depressions reoccurred time and time again so that the rest of society recognized that farmers usually got the short end of the stick.  The fact that this was not true during the New Deal parity years was erased from the public’s consciousness by years of agribusiness propaganda.  Despite the public’s high regard for family farmers, agribusiness, after World War II, said that what farmers needed was “market-oriented” farm policy—let market prices determine what farmers produce.  Ezra Taft Benson, President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, claimed that all New Deal programs—including minimum wage, Social Security, and parity farm programs—were “socialistic” and would lead the country to Communism.  

Prominent economists actually said there were too many farmers and farms were too small (echoing what farmers in the Global South told me they had been hearing more recently).   The incessant reduction of farm commodity buying power was to move farmers off the land so some farms would be more profitable by getting bigger while farmers busted off the land could earn a better living in cities and consumers would benefit from cheaper food. This anti-parity policy was first enacted in 1953 achieving the abandonment of the New Deal promise of parity. An evolution toward the agriculture seen today was set in motion at that time, along with the bipartisan propaganda which said that this was inevitable, and that our agricultural system would be the envy of the world.

Agribusiness knew that declining farm prices measured in inflation-adjusted prices (as per the parity ratio) would lead to fewer farmers, and that the remaining farmers would try to increase yields and farm more land—to get big or get out.  This created several vicious circles. Cheap grain led to cheap livestock.   As family farmers no longer made money raising livestock, their only option was to farm more land producing more corn and soybeans, which became cheap feed for larger and larger livestock operations (ultimately corporate CAFOs and giant feedlots). The cheap meat, milk, eggs, wheat, sugar, hydrogenated soybean oil, and corn sweeteners transformed the American diet to one dominated by manufactured food while local fruit, vegetable, dairy, and poultry producers became novelties.  Crop rotations that included legumes and grasses for hay and pasture, providing soil conservation, carbon sequestration, easy weed control, and a natural nitrogen source, disappeared also.

I believe understanding this evolution and educating our fellow citizens about this is critically important for several reasons:  

First, today’s destructive agriculture was not inevitable.  Politicians from both parties, in the midst of the Cold War, abandoned parity and opted for market-oriented policy at the behest of agribusiness, which did make our corporate-controlled food system inevitable.  

Second, it gave our imperialist foreign policy brainiacs cheap food to export and destroy traditional agriculture systems so as to make other countries dependent on cheap US imports.  (The threat of cutting off food shipments made food a political weapon.)

Third, the subsequent farm consolidation in other countries offered the opportunity to export agribusiness technology to convert their best land into sources of tropical products to export to the US and Europe.  

Fourth, understanding how and why we got here will help citizens who are disappointed and discontented with our modern society avoid falling for inauthentic leaders or dictators claiming to make America great again.  

Fifth, having farmers work within a parity system is the only way to guarantee that any other reforms like establishing local food systems can possibly succeed. Current local food producers must compete against conventional production that is based on exploitation of farmers and cheap labor while externalizing the costs to the environment and rural communities.

Finally, we will not be lured into organizing efforts that only talk about the symptoms of a sick agriculture without building the understanding for real reform. Parity must again become the foundation of opportunity for new farmers of all colors, genders, and backgrounds to become stewards of the land, and for all food producers and laborers—and their communities—to thrive.