There aren’t really nearly two million farms as we are told, but the government likes to say there are. Half of the so-called farms make little or no money and produce little or no food. They are lumped in with the large polluting farms. It allows the big polluters to skate.
People can call their land a farm if they produce or sell $1,000 or more of agricultural products. Even making no money can qualify as a farm with all the tax breaks if they have points. You can get points for acreage or animals or bees. The idea is they could make money so it counts.
I have a computer so I could be a computer scientist. I own a car so I could be an Uber driver.
The point system came about in the 1970s to include farms that just had a bad year.
According to the USDA, 25% of farms have no sales in a year.
“More and more of these people are being counted as farmers, even though they never intend to be farmers in terms of being a commercial operation,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor and natural resource economist at the University of Iowa who recently published a paper on the issue in the journal Agriculture and Human Values. “These really small operations provide political cover for the really large ones.”
The USDA also gives points to landowners who receive government subsidies to “retire” farmland for conservation purposes. It’s not a farm.
At least another 30 percent of farms generate $1,000 to $10,000 in sales, which means just a few thousand dollars in profit. Remove these two categories, and the number of US farms drops to around 800,000 from the 1.9 million claimed by the USDA.
The result is fewer and fewer big corporations own more and more of the farms.
The vast majority of farmed animals are raised indoors in massive warehouses. No more little red barns.
Policymakers and lobbyists are lying to us.
Half a Million Farms Lost Since 1980
Dr. St. Onge says we have lost half a million farms, one in five farms, since 1980. The government has given corporate farms unsurmountable advantages.
While the number of farms in America are in freefall, corporate farms and Wall Street are growing exponentially.
19% of Corporate Farms Produce Nearly 2/3rds of US Food
Corporate consolidation has driven the average farm size to 466 acres. That’s three times what it was a century ago. Currently 19% of corporate farms are producing nearly 2/3 of America’s foods. Since 1980 alone we’ve lost 89% of dairies and 91% of big farms, all replaced by corporations. It’s going to get worse with farmers losing money by farming some foods.
Corporations use farms as tax shelters that equal the size of Iowa. It’s a loss of 300 million acres that could be farmed.
The regulations and mandates are driving it. Corporations have financial privileges, water advantages and land banking tax shelters that private farms don’t. They never die so they don’t have to pay the death tax.
