Of
course not. What exists is the continuing exploitation of farmers
through capital and processing combines. The farmer gets enough to
do fine generally provide he exploits the land shamelessly and
single-mindedly. I do not think it can continue in the present form
but do expect manning increases and a shift toward higher quality
production simply because we are learning how.
Sooner
or later the growers can take back the downstream part of the
business completely and will simply because they have the capital now
and market entry has become painless. You set up a website extolling
Joes Cooperative and run a simple production line duly gov’t
approved and go for it. You can now compete with the big boys
locally right now and your customers can visit you for a feel good
walk about.
A
friend of mine took a six acre six thousand bird free range turkey
operation up to $200,000 gross doing just that. He had the
butchering skills of course, but if you are serious about animal
husbandry, so should you. Your ancestors certainly did.
Does
"Corporate Farming" Exist? Barely.
—By Tom
Philpott
Wed
Sep. 25, 2013
Goaded
on by small-is-good gospel, plenty of people have adopted a Manichean
view of modern US farming: large, soulless corporate enterprises on
one side, human-scale, artisanal operations on the other.
Take,
for example, Chipotle's much-discussed
new web ad, which tugs at the heartstrings by painting a haunting
picture of a small-time farmer who finds himself working for—and
then competing against—a fictional industrial-farming behemoth.
Reality
is a lot more complicated. While there are plenty of
mega-corporations in the food industry, they rarely do the actual
farming themselves.
A
USDA study released in August
found that 96.4 percent of US crop farms are "family farms,"
or "ones in which the principal operator, and people related to
the principal operator by blood or marriage, own more than half."
That number doesn't leave a lot of room for corporate farmers, does
it?
The
story is a bit—but not that much—different in meat production.
Pork, and pork only, actually has corporations raising significant
numbers of livestock. Here are the largest hog producers in the
United States, lifted from an interesting
2010 paper by Tufts University researchers Tim Wise and
Sarah Trist:
Wise
and Trist, 2010
Smithfield,
recently bought by the Chinese conglomerate Shuanghui International
(in a dealjust
approved by Smithfield's shareholders), is obviously a massive,
globe-spanning corporation. Not only does it raise about 1 in 5
American hogs, it also has a 31 percent share of the hog-processing
market, Wise and Trist show. When Smithfield directly raises 1.2
million hogs per year, that's corporate
farming.
But
after Smithfield, things change quickly. As the above chart shows,
the nation's fourth-largest hog producer, Iowa Select Farms, has a
2.5 percent market share. Yes, that's a lot of hogs—150,00
In
beef, the last stage of conventional cow production—fattening them
for slaughter—islargely
dominated by big players. Here (from a 2010
paper by Texas Tech University ag scientist M. L. Galyean)
are the biggest operators of feedlots—those massive, infamous pens
where cows spend their last days chomping on corn and soy-based feed,
laced with dodgy
additives:
###
Galyean,
2011
And here are
the dominant processors, the corporations that slaughter the fattened
cows and cut them into beef (note how Cargill and JBS appear on both
lists):
###
But
again, the farms that supply the feedlots—that raise the calves
until they are ready to be fattened in those corporate-run confined
finishing operations—are almost exclusively family-owned
businesses, as this 2011
USDA paper shows. And there are more than 700,000 of them.
As
for chicken, the USDA counts more than 17,000 operations producing
"broilers," or meat chickens. Very few of them are owned by
companies like Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride (a JBS subsidiary), or
Perdue—the mega-processors that slaughter and package most birds.
According to the USDA,
farms directly owned by those giants account for just 1 percent of
total broiler production. The bulk of the rest are family-owned,
albeit working under contract to a big
processor:
###
Chart:
USDA
So
what's going on here—why is the perception of "corporate
farming" so widespread when actually almost all of the country's
food is being grown or raised by family-owned operations?
It
might have something to do with the fact that corporate agribusiness
is indeed very real—it's just that it has carved out the most
profitable parts of food production for itself, while leaving the
dirty, uncertain work of farming for others.
The
reality is that farming itself is generally a terrible business.
There's much more—and much easier—money to be made by selling
farmers the raw materials of their trade—like seeds, fertilizer, or
livestock feed. And there's also plenty of money in buying farmers'
output cheap (say, corn or hogs) and selling it dear (as, say, pork
chops or high-fructose corn syrup). In his excellent 2004
book Against
the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, Richard
Manning pungently describes the situation:
A
farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his
corporation would simply take over the farms. The
exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that
it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers
are willing to exploit themselves.
Tomorrow,
I'll lay out, with charts, just how tough it is for farmers caught
between the huge corporate suppliers and the huge corporate buyers.
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