‘Truth About Industrial Agriculture’ — Myth-Busting Report Exposes Big Ag’s Large-Scale Deception

Guest Post by Kenny Stancil

If actors in the corporate food regime were required to internalize the true costs of production, according to a report by Family Farm Action Alliance,”their businesses would no longer be economically viable and they would not be competitive with independent farmers and ranchers.”

'Control of agricultural markets and concentration of power has proven to be a lucrative business for industrial agrifood corporations.'

In an effort to inform policymakers, advocates and the public about the impacts of agrifood corporations on the U.S. food system and build support for transforming the nation’s agricultural practices, the Family Farm Action Alliance released a new report on Wednesday that details how Big Ag‘s survival depends on externalizing costs and perpetuating myths about the supposed lack of more just and sustainable alternatives.

“Time and time again family farmers, rural communities and good food movement advocates have pushed to shift government support away from industrial agriculture and toward a more resilient and equitable system,” Joe Maxwell, president of Family Farm Action Alliance, said in a statement. “Time and time again, we have failed — because Big Ag controls the narrative. Our report offers a playbook to counter Big Ag’s deception and finally break their stranglehold on our food system.”

Titled “The Truth About Industrial Agriculture: A Fragile System Propped Up by Myths and Hidden Costs,” the report documents how corporations involved in the “economically flawed” agribusiness model “intentionally evade costs all along their supply chains.”

The costs that agrifood corporations avoid paying don’t simply disappear, however. Instead, the bill is passed along to “poorly paid and badly treated” agricultural workers, rural communities and consumers who are forced to contend with “unequal access to affordable, healthy food,” the report says. These costs “eventually surface in the form of taxpayer-funded subsidies, a degraded environment and poor public health outcomes.”

If actors in the corporate food regime were required to internalize the true costs of production, the report notes, “their businesses would no longer be economically viable and they would not be competitive with independent farmers and ranchers.”

The report identifies several “costs of doing business that industrial agrifood corporations simply don’t pay,” including:

  • Worker safety, healthcare and liveable wages.
  • Farm debt and adequate income for producers.
  • Increased local infrastructure maintenance taxes and utility maintenance.
  • Producer’s share of the retail price.
  • Rising crop insurance premiums.
  • Weather-related yield decreases.
  • Drinking and recreational water contamination.

According to the report, the negative consequences of industrial agriculture that powerful entities shift onto farmers, consumers and taxpayers hit low-income communities hardest of all.

“Control of agricultural markets and concentration of power has proven to be a lucrative business for industrial agrifood corporations,” wrote Emily M. Miller, research and policy manager for Family Farm Action Alliance and author of the report. “The erosion of antitrust enforcement, unbridled mergers and acquisitions, and monopolistic control of the agrifood system from local to global markets have yielded highly concentrated markets and corporations with unprecedented political and economic power.”

Miller added that:

“There is no more compelling evidence for the artificiality of agricultural markets than the feed-meat complex. The feed-meat complex is a cycle of constant feed-grain monocultures and concentrated animal feeding operation-raised livestock.

“Over decades of farm market erosion and political influence, industrial agrifood corporations have created the demand in domestic and foreign markets for commodities, trapped farmers into constrained production practices and contracts and created taxpayer subsidies and mandatory producer fees to fund the entire system — all while targeting links of exploitation and profit extraction within the supply chain.”

Rather than “alter their wealth-extracting supply chains … industrial agriculture interests would rather spend billions of dollars on lobbyists and myth-based marketing campaigns,” the report states. “The falsehoods they perpetuate persuade consumers and policymakers alike that there is no other option.”

One of the key contributions the report makes is to dismantle “some of the well-funded falsehoods that multinational agrifood corporations use to defend their destructive business model and defeat any meaningful reforms to the food system.”

For each “myth” propagated by Big Ag about hunger, food prices, public health, economic development, environmental degradation and lack of alternatives, the report provides a “truth” to challenge it.

According to the report:

  • Smaller farms meet 70% to 80% of the world’s food needs, and they could double or triple production without adopting industrial farming methods.
  • Efficiency limits of Big Ag’s large-scale, centralized production were reached years ago — yet not only are food prices high relative to inflation, more Americans are classified as food insecure than ever before.
  • The economic benefits industrial agriculture claims to offer rural communities are short-lived and vastly outnumbered by the damages they inflict on communities’ economic, civic, physical and environmental well-being.
  • Public health issues — including antibiotic resistance, asthma, cancer, hypertension and respiratory complications — are widely recognized by the scientific community as being linked to nearby industrial agriculture operations.
  • Industrial agriculture causes a host of environmental ills: degraded soil runs into waterways, rendering both drinking and recreation water unsafe; synthetic inputs rely heavily on fossil fuels; pesticide and herbicide use lead to decreased plant and animal biodiversity.
  • Industrial agriculture is the product of intentional policy decisions on the part of federal agencies and other decision-makers who promoted it as the future of agriculture.
  • The U.S. already boasts alternatives that offer built-in resilience and redundancy — collective food aggregation, cooperative groceries, farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares with local farmers and roadside stands, to name a few — that could be prioritized in our policies and subsidies.

“This report reveals that the current consolidated food system is nothing more than the result of policy choices that prioritized a large, concentrated industry,” Miller said in a statement.

“If we come together to make different choices,” she added, “we can have a competitive and democratized system that serves the needs of all Americans.”

If not, the report warns, “the long-term viability of the agrifood system will be threatened, guaranteeing that higher costs, both financial and human, will be paid in the future.”

Originally published by Common Dreams.

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Anonymous
Anonymous
brian
brian

Big Ag has always been a problem. Its a no-brainer that corporations are profit minded over all other concerns. Economies of scale is their biggest argument for existence when spoon feeding their spin for the dumbed down sheep.

I have sod buster relatives that still farm in Saskatchewan. The soils around the farm where I basically grew up on, used to be black as coal and like grease when it was wet. Today, the soils are grey and like powder even with no till management the ditches are slowly filling with blown in material. Everything is chemicalized to the max and I’m pretty sure that if you were to sample for biotics, it’d be near sterile.

Small family farms are more labour intensive, especially mixed farming. Some livestock and some soil based. It takes a person to move and care for animals, who don’t take holidays. There, imo, are two factors which big Ag took advantage of here. One, kids growing up don’t want to ‘work’ so they see parents working hard and opt for a ‘city’ style life. Less work, more money and way more fun. Big Ag comes in to buy or lease the farm.

Two, farming has become mechanized, computer controlled. Its to squeak out as much profit as possible, obviously. GPS guides tractors and the person in the tractor is essentially there to hit the stop button if things are going right, and to move the rig from the farm to the field. The 5G system, I’ve mentioned here before is part of that system of control coming soon.

Government has worked hand in glove with big Ag to kill small farming thru regulation that big Ag can either absorb or ignore. Weird how execs from these big Ag corporations somehow find themselves as controlling government departments in agriculture, and with no conflicts of interest /s.

I’d encourage people with younger families to do as we did and folks like Hardscrable, buy some acreage and go back to the land. Get out of urban areas which are magnets for trouble in any kind of emergency. Produce your own food and be a local supplier. Go to bed tired but happy. Sit for a meal and know that everything there was by your hand and you KNOW what went into it.

I apologise for being wordy but its frustrating to see government and corporations destroy the nations and its people thru food control. Its frustrating to see the dumb sheep merrily follow along with willful blinders on as long as they can get their avocado toast and soy latte in the morning. And my relatives are quite happy to keep destroying the soil and are ok being told what to grow each year. Last few years its been bird seed. go figure…

Ken31
Ken31

They are only that way because greed and avarice were allowed to be claimed as virtues by the psychopaths in corporate who obey the bankers.

I hope people understand the deliberate mistakes and deceptions of the US constitution so that they are not repeated if we get another chance. There are way better systems that have already done. It is an idiotic lie to claim it is the best system to date. Just look at us. That was driven from the top down, because the constitution is such a failure. It failed from day 1 and continues to fail today.

They are going to try to impose a new system on us. People should be looking to systems that have very little (if any) centralization. It is the only way to escape the tyrannical families controlling the world.

'Realilty' Doug
'Realilty' Doug

Mistakes in the US Constitution? I like that you would dare critically evaluate the U.S. Constitution. But it’s a document from God? Some of you believe that, right?

Anonymous
Anonymous

Surprise surprise surprise : The Circle Jerk Of Wall Street To K-Street To Capitol Street are screwing family farmers in favor of BIG AG , TECH , BUSINESS .
We old industrial mechanical people got fucked by that burning log decades ago !
While you plow your fields with a CHI COM tractor and your truck has CHI COM TIRES …etc
You get the point !
Our country is not ours anymore the January 6 prosecution of protestors proves that !
Welcome to the tossed under the bus club !

'Reality' Doug
'Reality' Doug

Kenny Stancil is a terrible writer because he is an unaccomplished thinker. He made almost nothing but accusations and other assertions. I still don’t know what the difference is in the business models of Big Ag and the ‘family farm’. Showing me one example of systemically damning design is better than 1000 naked assertions.

Ken31
Ken31

That is a good point. Every time I have tried to discuss agricultural economics with people, I give up because of how clueless people are. I am sure there are people better qualified on here to answer. If They don’t Ill take a stab.

Ginger
Ginger

The Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card and the understanding of its future is important. Some Walmarts in places in this country take in billions just through EBT.
Your post below on Rome is very interesting.

Yahsure
Yahsure

There used to be like a million small farmers and now it’s a million small farms owned by large corporations. I pretty much stopped buying beef a few years ago when the prices went up like crazy and my local store’s selection looks really poor also. Using corn for fuel helped bring about the high prices of feed/beef. Done on purpose? I think beef is slowly being phased out by the nut jobs that supposedly represent us. Raise poultry/small critters to eat. Maybe beef will be there in the future but the prices will be crazy. Don’t rely on the food supply unless you enjoy eating bugs in the future.

'Realilty' Doug
'Realilty' Doug

Maybe between the 2nd and 3rd wars with Carthage, Roman political elites backed by bankers bought up all the farm land and the family farm was no more. That is when Romans were placated with bread and circus. Seems to be the same shit and I can do nothing.

William Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 3, ch. 4, section 5 (AFAIK):

The Roman of those centuries had little need of medicine, for his active life in farming or soldiering kept him healthy and strong. He took to the land as the Greek to the sea; he based his life on the soil, built his towns as meeting places for farmers and their products, organized his armies and his state on his readiness to defend and extend his holdings, and conceived his gods as spirits of the living earth and the nourishing sky.

As far back as we can reach into Rome’s past we find private property. Part of the land, however, was ager publicus – public acreage usually acquired by conquest and owned by the state. The peasant family of the early Republic owned two or three acres, tilled them with all hands and occasionally a slave, and lived abstemiously on the product. They slept on straw, rose early, stripped to the waist, and plowed and harrowed behind leisurely oxen whose droppings served as fertilizer,…

War transformed this picture of rural toil. Many of the farmers who changed plowshares for swords were overcome by the enemy or the town and never returned to their fields; many others found their holdings so damaged by armies or neglect that they had not the courage to begin anew; others were broken by accumulated debt. Such men sold their lands at depression prices to aristocrats or agricultural capitalists who merged the little homesteads into latifundia (literally, broad farms), turned these vast areas from cereals to flocks and herds, orchards and vines, and manned them with war-captured slaves under an overseer who was often himself a slave. The owners rode in now and then to look at their property; they no longer put their hands to the work, but lived as absentee landlords in their suburban villas or in Rome. This process, already under way in the fourth century B.C., had by the end of the third produced a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital a propertyless, rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.

Ghost

The owners rode in now and then to look at their property; they no longer put their hands to the work, but lived as absentee landlords in their suburban villas or in Rome.

I grew up on a small family farm in Southeast Missouri, about a hundred miles, give or take twenty, from where I now live in the Ozarks. I pretty much witnessed the end of the family farm during my childhood, although my father continued to fight city hall until the bitter end, allowing his tenant farmer to collect government subsidies on the land my father refused to ever sign up for. He claimed the government subsidy would be the end of the small family farmer in the region.

He was correct.

Now, the farms all have corporate logos letting you know which company owns the seed and all rights to the progeny.

And, by the way? They still use the hell out of Roundup in most of the central USA farming states. I was shocked to learn that Missouri has not outlawed its use, even with all the evidence of long term damage it does to soil and water.

HSF has told you all about the tilth of the soil. When I was a kid, my father kept about 50 head of cattle to rotate around the farm from year to year, depending on what crops he chose to plant. That was how Dad took care of our soil and, along with a bit of lime every few years to help break down the manure, the land grew bountiful crops.

comment image

Fast forward to now, when corporate farmers pay per seed for patented seed guaranteed to produce maximum output if all the right fertilizers and additives are used. And, since farmers cannot make money if they do not produce maximum output, all the right fertilizers and additives are carefully measured and drizzled onto the crops for your future consumption.

Then, after harvest, the fields are burned to eliminate leftovers. There will be no gleaning for the poor around there.

Stucky

This is for Hardscrabble Farmer … and other growers of food.

Saved this a week or so ago. Seems like a good time to post it. Seems like there is a Shortage Of Insects!!

Ken31
Ken31

Corporate farming is not an alarmist issue. Food and how it is produced is important and corporations are proven to be bad faith actors. They will destroy you and your health for profit. And they don’t care if it is irreversible at either end.

'Realilty' Doug
'Realilty' Doug

Incorporated authority is the enemy. It is the meta-organism that allows subhumans to take over as pseudo-civilized and violate the Prime Directive.

DirtpersonSteve
DirtpersonSteve

As long as the 1st presidential contest is still held in Iowa nothing will change.

rhs jr
rhs jr

It’s a Big Club and the Family Farm ain’t in it. I can grow on my small farm all the peanuts, fruit & nuts, raise livestock or whatever I want but I can’t sell them to The Club where 99.9% of people shop; and if I sell them to folks, I am bound to break some Ag or health rule and the government will plunder my farm. Those 99.9% of shoppers will one day have to take The Poison Shot and the Mark Of The Beast in order to buy food; y’all vote for Politicians that support TPTB System that screws me and y’all have earned my disgust so don’t expect me to save your lazy starving insouciant asses when government and Big Ag weans y’all of real food and shoves expensive Sollient Green and bugs down your starving throats, bon appetite.

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