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Why Farmland Shouldn’t Be a Commodity with Sarah Mock
23 Plays42 minutes ago
We all need land to eat, but more and more, farmland has become a financial asset instead of a source of food, livelihood, and community. And when agriculture becomes just another investment, we risk losing something essential, not just for farmers, but for the health, resilience, and future of our entire society.
Journalist and researcher Sarah Mock joins us to unpack the deep consequences of treating land like a commodity - from pricing out new farmers, to consolidating ownership, to weakening the rural communities that once thrived around agriculture.
We explore the forgotten history of agrarian populism, the modern land trap that affects both aging landowners and aspiring farmers, and why the future of food depends on rethinking ownership - not just optimizing yields.
In this episode, we dive into:
- Why land "defies capitalism" - and what that means for our food system.
- The double bind of retiring farmers and new farmers locked out by land prices.
- How the disappearance of agrarian populism has shaped today’s agriculture policy.
- The myth of the silver-bullet tech fix for food and farming.
- Real alternatives to land as a speculative commodity.
- And what it would take to make small and mid-size farming viable again.
More about Sarah:
Sarah Mock is a food and agriculture writer, researcher, and podcaster. She grew up on a small farm in Wyoming, and since then has spent more than a decade working on everything from farm production, strategy, and marketing to ag history and economics to food logistics, supply chains, and climate impact. She’s worked in and around agriculture across the country and around the globe, with non-profits, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Silicon Valley companies, the national news media, and directly with farms. Her work has culminated in a number of award-winning projects, including her best-selling book Farm (and Other F Words) and her podcast series The Only Thing That Lasts, which explores the past, problems, and possibilities of American farmland. Learn more at https://sarahkmock.com/.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
The Nature and Economy of Land
00:00:01
Speaker
Land defies capitalism. Most things in like our society or really in our economy can be bought or sold and equated to other things that are similar. Land is not like that.
00:00:13
Speaker
It cannot be moved. It's important where it is. The geography matters. The people who live around matter. Like all of those things defy commoditization. placeness of agrarian populism was so important that people said like, no, like this is my land, this is my place, this is my community. People were willing to like take a stand where they were and say like, no, we're together going to build community sufficiency because like we deserve to. We deserve to live in a like free economy with both an economic system that works for everyone, not just the rich, and a political system that works for everyone, not just the rich.
Historical Farming Practices and Community
00:00:50
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:01:02
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:01:16
Speaker
So Sarah, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to Agrarian Futures. What I really would like to get into here today is to have you help us understand more of the history of how we got to where we are at.
00:01:31
Speaker
Since the dawn of agriculture, agriculture has been subsistence farming. For the most part, right? There's a little bit of producing for others. There's a little bit of export, tiny bit of export. But even that is a tiny fraction for most of history.
00:01:45
Speaker
And up until the last 100 years, most of the population, and just about any agrarian society, lived on the land and was farming, whether it was their main occupation or it was something that they just did on the side to produce their own food, right?
00:01:58
Speaker
You didn't have grocery stores, you didn't have refrigeration, you didn't have transportation that you could easily move fresh food all over the place. so If you wanted to have your own good food, you more or less had to grow it.
00:02:08
Speaker
And family farms, also that required a lot of labor, right? Like you didn't have sprays, you didn't have tractors, you didn't have chemicals. And that really isn't part of our world anymore. For the most part, we are in a very different time.
00:02:21
Speaker
And we still have this old framework. this old system. Now it might be time to renovate some of that. Sure. I was just going to say, you know, and I think at some level, even in the past when we've kind of idealized this, we've had any number of them, right? Like we've had the homestead movement. We had the pioneers. We had the pilgrims who first came to North America from Europe. out All of those people were kind of raised up as these ultra self-sufficient. They are take care of themselves entirely. They are totally like self-reliant.
00:02:51
Speaker
And it has never been true. Every like European farmer that's ever farmed in America has been connected to a cash economy. Even the very first pilgrims who came here like bought tea. but Tea doesn't grow in America. No one was self-reliantly getting their tea.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's a story that's been very important to America. as like an idea of just like, we can be self-reliant, we don't need anyone, we are radically independent, we are rugged individuals, like we are, this self-sufficiency is like a fundamental part of what it means to have the identity of American, but it has always been flawed.
00:03:26
Speaker
It has never really been very accurate, not to mention that, yes, as you just said, what it has really depended on, even the level of self-sufficiency that we've achieved, depended incredibly on unpaid labor, whether that was slavery, whether that was people brought here from Africa, people brought here from Asia, people brought here from Central America, Native American people, or the unpaid labor of women and children.
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah,
Agrarian Populism and Political Influence
00:03:50
Speaker
yeah. I think back to to stories that I heard of my grandfather when he was growing up, though. They had a farm. It wasn't a production-oriented farm. They probably grew enough corn that they could sell a little bit of it.
00:04:03
Speaker
But mostly it was for self-sufficiency. They had a hog because everyone had a hog because you have... you have waste products that come out of your kitchen and you're you're feeding that to the hog and you have chickens because you want fresh eggs and you have a big garden.
00:04:15
Speaker
And so let's say that the household was 50% or 75% self-sufficient in all the things that they needed the most. And they had potatoes and they like they could feed themselves and they but but they still have these connections to the broader economy. They weren't doing their own flour because there's a lot of work to do your own flour and to mill all that.
00:04:35
Speaker
So at least in in broad strokes, maybe we simplify the story of, yes, these people were completely self-sufficient, but in broad strokes, they were much, much more self-sufficient than even even our farms today. farms today that are incredibly productive and produce much more than any farms ever in history, especially on a per-person basis, they're those farms are probably even more reliant on the outside economy because if you produce, um don't care how much corn you produced, you're not going to, you're not going to eat that corn.
00:05:07
Speaker
Right. And if you do all that corn, you produce all that corn, but you're not producing veggies and potatoes and, and a hog and your chickens. You're even more reliant on the outside world.
00:05:18
Speaker
kind of building off of this and and looking at the situation today, which is that, you know, less than 1% of the population is farming. Most farms are still predominantly family farms.
00:05:30
Speaker
They are not treated the way that other businesses are treated as, you know, Sarah, you've mentioned in a lot of your writing and in particular, your first book, And also a lot of them are are struggling and there's a kind of deep misunderstanding and kind of economic and political marginalization among farming communities.
00:05:51
Speaker
But this has not always been the case. Could you kind of kind of help understand? start to chart like the course of kind of how has this evolved and particularly how's it evolved since the earlier era of populism that kind of was seen from like the 1870s and 1930s in particular with the the People's Party and then the Southern Farmers Tenant Union and maybe kind of How can it play into kind of what is happening today and kind of approaches for the future in terms of thinking through how can we rebuild kind of economic and political power for farming and our kind of agricultural economy?
00:06:30
Speaker
So the start of the answer to that question is goes back to what I just mentioned about you know this, the narrative of the self-sufficient farmer has always been important to the American project. It kind of motivated a lot of actions, a lot of land taking in American history. So it it was the kind of warm, fuzzy thing that smoothed out a lot of violence.
00:06:49
Speaker
And like you know ah we justified a lot of things that we did. by saying like, yes, but it's for the sake of farmers. And like, we are a nation of farmers and this is who we are. And we're gonna like, ah we might've, you know, taken all this land from people who it was rightfully theirs, but we did it because farming is inherently a good thing. And family farms are like good units of, of economic activity. And like, this is the right way for democracies and human beings to like work and live.
00:07:17
Speaker
And that continued to be true for white Americans for ah much of the eighteen hundreds And there was more land to the West that like, as you know, cities began to get crowded and more immigrants arrived. And there was like these kind of nodes of unrest as people didn't have jobs and factory worked was terrible. And like, there was,
00:07:35
Speaker
all this angst about like we're poor and there's all of these rich people around and we want to do something about it. There was just the West and people could just say like, oh, you're unhappy with your lot here. Like go out West, go to Iowa, then go to Nebraska, then go to Nevada.
00:07:50
Speaker
And you can, you can get your own land. You can do your, be your own boss, be your own king in your own castle. And that worked. That was a great strategy politically for a very long time. There was not a lot of unrest.
00:08:01
Speaker
Well, that happened, you know, besides the Civil War, that was a bit of unrest that was not planned by anyone. But after the Civil War, Obviously, a lot of stuff happened. I'm not a deep historian on Civil War history, but the end of the Civil War coincided with the essentially the closure of the West. There was no more land.
00:08:21
Speaker
There was no more just go out there and and get yourself a homestead. It'll be easy and quick. There were already people farming in places that they shouldn't. There was already people trying to like dig up the prairie in Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico where there was just not rain and it did not work.
00:08:36
Speaker
And people were... broke and like getting poor all the time. You know, the you the United States politically and economically was trying to recover from the civil war in the years after. And they made some big decisions that were very unpopular, that were great for kind of the elite and the rich and the banks and not so great for ordinary people who, you know,
00:08:57
Speaker
More than three quarters of the U.S. population was still farmers at the time. So ordinary people who are poor, essentially subsistence farmers not doing well. I should say subsistence scale farming. So they were still growing corn and wheat for commodity markets, but they were doing it at ah at a level that like they were only making just enough to survive.
00:09:16
Speaker
Farmers throughout this period were known to be very poor. They were the poorest people in America. but they were also most people in America. you know We had this era from the 1870s to the 1930s where there was just an incredible amount of of unrest. And it was there was labor unrest, there was farmer unrest, and we call this the era of radical agrarian populism.
00:09:36
Speaker
Because they just like people, farmers came together. They had parades. They made a whole people's party, won state legislatures in many states. They created antitrust legislation. They put regulations on the railroads. They wanted to socialize grain production and banks. And, you know, they had this big vision of like a government and an economy that works for ordinary people, not for the rich.
00:10:03
Speaker
You know, the funny thing is when I talk to when I've talked to historians about this, they weren't notably socialists. They weren't anti-capitalism. They were all capitalists. They owned their farmland and they weren't trying to give that up. They weren't trying to live in like a, you know, like on an agrarian common. They weren't trying to do like a public land sharing thing.
00:10:19
Speaker
They just wanted a fair deal. They just wanted to not be taken advantage of by the railroads and the local banks and their state legislature. They just wanted to like be able to like live and farm in a free market.
00:10:31
Speaker
And they gained a lot of ground over that kind of 40 to 60 year window. And eventually the populist party did kind of fall to the wayside as it in integrated with the Democratic Party. I mean, FDR is really in a lot of ways the like embodiment of the populist idea. The New Deal is like very populist in its essence.
00:10:52
Speaker
all of the the kind of legislation that came out of that. But, you know, I think one of the most important takeaways for us today when thinking about that era of populism, that kind of anti-monopolistic moment in history was, I love this line that I just heard from a historian, land defies capitalism. Yeah.
00:11:11
Speaker
The point being that like every, most things in like our society or really in our economy can be bought or sold and equated to other things that are similar, right? Like you have a factory, it's 10,000 square feet.
00:11:23
Speaker
Every other factory that's 10,000 square feet that can like accomplish approximately the same thing is like approximately the same thing. You could sell it for a similar price. It is essentially like very similar. And like you could think about as a company, like moving around to different factories, moving around to different offices, like things are fungible and similar.
00:11:40
Speaker
These are like widgets. These are like items. You can just like move them around. Land is not like that. It cannot be moved. It's important where it is. The geography matters. The people who live around matter. Like all of those things defy commoditization, which is really what like our financial system is about. And so I think...
00:12:00
Speaker
Placeness of agrarian populism was so important that people said like, no, like this is my land, this is my place, this is my community, especially once there was no other place to go.
00:12:11
Speaker
People were willing to like take a stand where they were and say like, no, I'm going to build or we're together going to build community sufficiency. Because like we deserve to we deserve to live in a like free economy with both an economic system that works for everyone, not just the rich and a political system that works for everyone, not just the rich.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was desperate times like people starved farmers starved during this era. But I mean, it was also some of the most like socially active moments in American history. And it's interesting that we never learn about them.
00:12:43
Speaker
To help us out with placing this historically, is this also overlapping with the Dust Bowl in that era, which is one of the few times that we had pretty significant famines in the United States? It does not. So the Dust Bowl started in about 1932 and went until like or okay It actually, so the interesting thing and one of the things that killed agrarian populism was World War one Not maybe for the reasons you'd think, but because grain prices went up hugely because Europe needed to buy all the grain.
00:13:13
Speaker
You know, the fundamental drivers of agrarian populism were economic. People didn't want to be poor and starving to death. As soon as they had money again, because corn was worth something, they were out of the movement.
00:13:26
Speaker
They didn't want to do it anymore because they could sell at a good price. And so they were making money, so they weren't starving. So they lost their kind of like motivation for collective action. Fascinatingly, I think similarly, then World War I ended, the huge demand glut evaporated.
Challenges Facing Modern Farmers
00:13:39
Speaker
And immediately after World War I was the beginning of an agrarian depression that lasted for two decades all throughout the Dust Bowl.
00:13:46
Speaker
technically separate. And that's why an agrarian populism was essentially gone by then. So people had no form of like collective resistance to stand up to this like new crash of the market and devastation and, and then the environmental devastation that came with the Dust Bowl and other kind of ecological disasters at the time.
00:14:05
Speaker
So going back to the agrarian populism that kind of coincides roughly with the 1870s to the 1930s, can you talk a little bit about some of the key outcomes they were able to achieve during that period?
00:14:19
Speaker
Sure. So it is a broad span. And I do think it's actually most exciting and interesting when you look at the state level. When you look at a state like North Dakota, they have a state run bank.
00:14:30
Speaker
They have a state run grain mill. State run corporations are like a thing that most people probably would not believe exists in the United States. But yeah, in North Dakota, they did both of those. That's what they that's what the populists wanted. They succeeded. The populists got, again, they never won the presidency, though they ran a presidential candidate three times.
00:14:49
Speaker
But they did win a lot of state legislatures. And they had majorities in like Nebraska. I think in both of the Dakotas at some point, they did well in like Iowa and Minnesota. And the populists also did well a little bit further west among minors, which had a very similar problem, right?
00:15:06
Speaker
Yeah. They were laborers, they were poor, they were hurt, especially by some monetary policies that like reduce the value of silver. And so the gains kind of at the state level were big. And a lot of the early laws to regulate rail rates were one at the state level, though they eventually were, I think, in most places set at the federal level as well.
00:15:25
Speaker
So yeah, ah the big wins nationally, huge antitrust stuff. A lot of that came additionally through like the jungle and as and people where people were a little bit more familiar with like Upton Sinclair and people got scared about food.
00:15:37
Speaker
But that probably would not have been as successful without this like growing narrative around kind of monopolists that preexisted that time taking on monopolies and that the government should have a role in taking on monopolies. That was populism did that for you.
00:15:51
Speaker
and and regulating kind of like public things. So like the railroad essentially in the West was like a public, there were very few places where two railroads came to the same town. So if only one railroad services your town, then they have a monopoly, which basically makes them a public utility.
00:16:06
Speaker
And populists were the people who were like, no, the railroad shouldn't get to charge like 80% for rail rates. Like, that's not fair because I can't go to a different railroad with a better rate. Banks were similar. Banks in the Midwest at the time were charging like 40% interest.
00:16:21
Speaker
And there was like very little regulation around that. So banking regulation was another big part of it. The Federal Reserve getting the farm credit is a populist kind of endeavor, came out of populist action as well.
00:16:32
Speaker
So having like specialized banks that lent to farmers with an understanding that farmers have like a different situation, need to pay on a different schedule or making different kinds of investments than other people and other businesses.
00:16:43
Speaker
So yeah, a lot of ah very ranging kind of ideas. And I think, again, you could put a lot of the New Deal and FDR's victories on populism. There was a lot of populists in the FDR administration.
00:16:55
Speaker
And the New Deal in general was basically like taking big chunks of the populist platform and just saying like, great, now we're doing it. Yeah, in your podcast that you recently did, The Only Thing That Lasts, you talk about William Jennings Bryan, you know, who ran, i think, first through the People's Party and then in the Democratic Party. And he never ended up winning the election, but did become secretary of state.
00:17:20
Speaker
Can you talk about kind of his role in taking some of these populist demands and kind of assimilating them into the Democratic and, you know, then progressive kind of agenda of the early nineteen hundreds Little bit of background. So the interesting thing is coming into this era, the farmers and and poor farmers especially were ah said There was like the assumption that they were Republican.
00:17:46
Speaker
And this was because Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act and he was a Republican. It was it was the Abraham Lincoln Republican Party, right? Not the Republican Party of today, because Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Republicans felt very entitled to this agrarian vote because it's like we gave you the land.
00:18:02
Speaker
And so we just assume that forever. Now you'll be dedicated to our political party. But really, at the time, both the Democrats and the Republicans would come and campaign in these rural areas and just say, like, everything's great.
00:18:16
Speaker
The markets are great. The economy is booming. There's jobs in cities. Everyone should be happy. It's funny because it sounds kind of familiar. to the way politicians talk to people today.
00:18:27
Speaker
And at the same time, farmers are, you know, literally they're ah a historian. i talked to you told a great story about a Republican came to campaign in this small town in Iowa. They set up a debate with a local populist official who was running and the Republican stood up and talked about how everything was going great and how life was better than ever in America and how everyone should be so excited about this moment.
00:18:48
Speaker
And then the populist candidate stood up took a shovel full of corn and shoveled it into the fire because corn was so cheap at the time that farmers couldn't afford coal.
00:18:59
Speaker
So they were just burning corn, grain corn. and that And then he sat down and he won the debate. And like, this was this was the moment. Like, this is what the politics of the time were, is that like,
00:19:13
Speaker
And what William Jennings Bryan did, that famous cross of gold speech, I love the descriptions of it. The newspapers described it as bedlam. Like the crowd went nuts. People were like, people were literally like fainting and like losing their minds that they were so enthralled by both his speaking skills. I mean, he was young and enthusiastic and there weren't a microphone. So he was just talking loud, but they literally, people had never, especially poor people, especially poor farmers had never had a politician tell them your concerns are valid.
00:19:43
Speaker
you don't deserve to be poor. We don't only serve like rich people. The working class also deserves. And not only that, what right. William Jennings Bryan, the kind of core of his message was cities depend on you.
00:19:56
Speaker
Like cities would collapse without your labor, without your land, without the work that you do in poverty, like here in the these rural places. And people had never heard a message like that before.
00:20:07
Speaker
They had never been told they were important or valid or that they mattered. And so to have a politician and a party that centered them and their needs and said like, not that like you deserve to work harder, which was kind of the message, right?
00:20:21
Speaker
Farmers are so gritty and they're so self-reliant that like, and that's the, that is like the the end in itself. That's the reward is like the hard work. And then to have a politician and a political party come for the first time and say like, no, what you deserve for all that hard work is a fair deal.
00:20:36
Speaker
the ability to succeed. Like you don't deserve to be taken advantage of by these corporations who are but exploiting your labor and exploiting your resources. And I think that really activated a lot of people. It motivated a lot of people. And it, yeah, it was something that had just like never really been around in America before.
00:20:55
Speaker
It seems that a large factor of why populism or that or why farmers had such political power at that moment in time was that there were so many farmers. like there was It was such a large portion of the population of the United States at that point.
00:21:12
Speaker
And today we're at a very, very different place where it's a fraction of what it used to be as a portion of the population So how do you think that factor, the fact that there's so few farmers anymore, has changed the the political power that farmers have? In many ways, they they probably have an outsized political power compared to the number of people that that are being represented. I think it has to do with the cultural that we put farmers up on the pedestal.
00:21:42
Speaker
And also, like, they control a lot of land. It might not very be very many people, but they control a large area of the country. Can you help flesh out how the political or the the power dynamic has shifted over the last hundred or so years with so many people getting out of farming?
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, you know, i think the big shift really started taking hold in the 1930s. And I will fast forward through this a bit to get us up to today. But ah FDR's Secretary of Agriculture was a prairie populist who believed that like essentially he grew up on a farm and he loved farming. He was actually also the the founder of Pioneer Seed, which tells you a lot too about like, he also loved technology and he like believed in a future where like there was less hard work. It's easy when we look back at history to forget that people thought about things differently
00:22:34
Speaker
In the past than we do now. And I think, you know, when we think about the end of that era, right, the end of that era where so where farmers were starving, where they had to, like, take to the streets to demand very basic rights, even though they represented a huge part of the population. One of the big things that people took out of that era was just like, we got to get people off the farm.
00:22:51
Speaker
Like people are being wasted on the farm. Too much of our population is on the farm living in squalor. And if we could just get them off the farm into better jobs, then that would be better. They would like it better.
00:23:03
Speaker
There's like a classic quote about like, you know, how many poets and doctors and scientists are wasted doing manual labor when your society depends on that. So that was the mindset that a lot of people had going into the New Deal, which is why Basically, the New Deal, the early farm bills and every farm bill we've seen since then has really focused on how to industrialize a farm, how to increase the technology, how to increase use of machines to free up labor yeah out of agriculture so that people can like go away and do something better.
00:23:32
Speaker
That was a ah really critical moment for the political power and how it's distributed in agriculture, right? Because After that period, we see this massive, the beginning, the industrialization and the massive consolidation in agriculture. Basically before that time, people might've owned hundreds or thousands of acres, but you couldn't farm it yourself.
00:23:49
Speaker
So if you owned a thousand acres, you were renting out to many people. You had many tenants. And then in this moment, which is, if you've read like Grapes of Wrath, like this is that moment where then suddenly there were tractors and there was all these new tools and technologies in part paid for by the USDA.
00:24:05
Speaker
And you could just evict all your tenants and do it all yourself because suddenly it was possible to do it all yourself. So these large landowners no longer had tenants, no longer had farm workers, and they freed...
00:24:18
Speaker
heavy air quotes around freed all these people from the farm to go follow their heart and like live in the city and do some other work that maybe is more fulfilling and that they like more. Obviously, a lot of those people didn't want to leave the farm, but that wasn't an option. Staying was not an option in general.
00:24:33
Speaker
Obviously, the world wars helped because people came back, especially from World War Two and got the GI Bill and could buy a house in the suburbs. And like our society started to change in big, dramatic ways. But before that kind of industrialization, people on the land did have a lot of power and agrarian populism had a lot of success in part because of their power and their connection to the land in place.
00:24:54
Speaker
Once the people were gone, the people who were left still had all that power. It was just... consolidated into very few people's hands. I would say that is the system we have today, which is that large landowners still have a tremendous amount of political power.
00:25:08
Speaker
Most of it, most of agriculture's power belongs to 200,000 people who are commercial scale agriculture producers on the land, more than a thousand acres, almost certainly, unless you're in California.
00:25:21
Speaker
Small farmers, subsistence farmers, renters, anyone who's operating at like below, again, air quotes, below a commercial scale, less than $350,000 a year, essentially has no political power, especially at the lowest level, right? Farm workers don't even have political protections.
00:25:37
Speaker
They don't even have like legal protections. There is has always been a bit of a divide everywhere in America, right? Rich people have more political power and legal protections than poor people, which is still true in agriculture. It has just become very extreme where rich farmers, there is a lot of kind of like pretense around like, no, all farmers are all in it together. That is generally like not shown to be the case, right?
00:26:01
Speaker
Most farmers do not benefit from USDA commodity payments or crop insurance. Large farmers do commodity farmers do grain farmers do and most small farmers don't and are like specifically excluded and have no protections and are are often vulnerable to the predation of big farmers are vulnerable to like having land bought out from under them or there's a lot of different ways that I can go if you want to talk about land consolidation.
00:26:25
Speaker
So yeah, I would say today big farms have a lot of power little farms have basically none. Going from, you know, the early 1900s where like still more than half of the population was involved in farming to today where less than 1% is involved, farms are incredibly consolidated.
00:26:43
Speaker
And as you mentioned, there is a, you know, small group, of people that own and have access to large amounts of land and are the only ones really that have any sort of political control.
00:26:58
Speaker
Could you flesh that out a little bit and kind of talk about what does that look like? Who are these large landowners and how do they have political sway? I will say 98% farms in America are family farms. So most of the largest landowners still families still owned by private individuals.
00:27:16
Speaker
There's not really a lot of actual corporate agriculture as in farms owned by businesses. And even like investor owned farmland, I feel like there's like a bit of a a thing about how that's a big problem, but actually very little farmland is owned by investors compared to how much is owned by farmers. But yes, it is mostly what we think of as industrial scale family farms.
00:27:36
Speaker
So I think there's like a a number of ways to look at this, right? Like this is not a group who, it's not a homogenous group. It's not, it's pretty heterogeneous, different regions, different crop different kind of like levels of power. If you want to talk about like the most outpowered group in America, confusingly, cotton growers in the South.
00:27:55
Speaker
Tiny quantity, vanishingly small number of people, incredible amounts of political power. I mean, yes, the South has always been overpowered in agricultural discussions in the United States, literally since our founding.
00:28:08
Speaker
I mean, i think you could say the Civil War is the result of an overpower amongst Southern planters. Most people probably think of corn, soybean growers in the Midwest, a little bit of wheat.
Economic Pressures and Crop Dynamics
00:28:19
Speaker
There's wheat is a declining crop in the United States. It's actively been declining for a very long time.
00:28:24
Speaker
And it's also been really marginalized. If you can grow corn and soybeans, you do. You grow wheat where you can't grow corn and soybeans. Kansas, Nebraska, Dakotas, Montana a bit. But if you're in Iowa, Illinois, most parts of Nebraska, across the rest of the I states into Minnesota, down to Arkansas, you're growing corn and soybeans.
00:28:43
Speaker
And these farms are big. They're, you know, over a thousand acres. They operate. and They need big equipment. They need mil multimillion dollar operating loans every year to buy input seeds, fertilizer, crop protection. They sell millions or tens of millions of bushels every year into a global commodity market.
00:29:03
Speaker
These are the big farms. This is how that industry works. You can't really have 200 acres of corn. At least not economically. That's just not how it works. You have to have like $1,500 to even afford the equipment. And those folks are incredibly powerful in a number of different ways. They're powerful individually going to their lawmakers. When you think about like someone like a senator, right?
00:29:26
Speaker
They are beholden to like a geographical area. And the more of the geographical area you own... the more beholden they are to you. Beyond that kind of like one-to-one political power, they also have like incredibly strong advocacy groups, the Farm Bureau, incredibly wealthy, incredibly strong. Then there's the individual commodity groups, the soybean growers, corn growers groups, state levels of those organizations as well can be incredibly powerful. They lobby, they get politicians elected, they bend the regulatory environment to fit the needs of their farmers they represent.
00:29:58
Speaker
And then, of course, they help shape the Farm Bill. And the Farm Bill is the distribution of resources, you know, spending tens of millions of dollars every year to provide financial protection to farmers, crop insurance, invest in agricultural tools and technology, which, you know, is like advanced corn seeds, advanced soybean seeds. There's a reason we're not investing in like advanced tomato seeds.
00:30:20
Speaker
It's because there's no tomato lobby. Right. or it's not as strong as it used to be. So yeah, it is, the the political power is deep. It's entrenched, it's economic, it's spatial, like it's geographic.
00:30:31
Speaker
And it's also just old. I think agricultural political groups are probably the most like old boys clubs there is. And some of them, interestingly, if you look at a group like the National Milk Producers Federation, still pretty...
00:30:45
Speaker
progressive, a holdover from the populist era. The Great Lakes states were quite progressive. They were radical. They were essentially like laborers. So they were they had a much more kind of radical progressive groups. And there are a few kind of like holdout groups. National Farmers Union is the other one, a quite progressive group when most of the other agricultural groups are like quite conservative.
00:31:05
Speaker
but in their leanings and supportive politicians. So it is interesting. And you can still see even today kind of populist power still around, but swaying the United States government or state governments costs a lot of money.
00:31:17
Speaker
And that is exactly the reason why poor farmers don't have any power. I want to push back a little bit on this point. You're kind of painting the picture of this small group of privileged, wealthy farmers with lots of land that kind of control politics, have strong lobby groups that are like implementing the policies that continue to support them at the national level.
00:31:40
Speaker
just kind of control the situation. And I imagine that is true, like, ah like, you know, among the largest farms in the country. But I feel like there's also like a quite a large group of farmers that have access to quite a bit of land, it might be like 2000 3000, even 5000 acres conventionally, even at an organic level, it might be like up to 1000 acres that are sitting on land that is worth a lot of money.
00:32:05
Speaker
kind of do fall into that group of like landed large scale farmers, but are still struggling to make a living. you You know, if you talk to a lot of farmers and in rural communities, there is very strong support for like the corn lobby for all this kind of stuff. But I kind of get the sense that in some cases, it's not so much like let's continue to protect our interests that are making us rich, but more this kind of, i don't want to say tribalistic, but like almost like they're, you know,
00:32:33
Speaker
in their own ways, despite the fact that they own so much land, they're marginalized and barely holding on. They're kind of on this like treadmill where like they're constantly having to take out bigger operating loans to get the latest mechanized machinery. And like, they're just holding on their culture, their identities tied to this land and kind of in this and and are kind of cornered into a position where like They view their only option to survive as perpetuating the status quo.
00:33:04
Speaker
But it's coming less from like, a you know, this is such a good situation for us. Like, let's continue to like support this lobby. But more like, you know, we're so constrained and cornered that this is our only option to continue.
00:33:16
Speaker
Does that make any sense? Yeah. Yes, I think so. And I do think that that is real to people. I think people's, I mean, I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of farmers in a very similar situation who I think part of it is the sense that being land rich and cash poor, which is hard because it's like, I just want to run this business. And know I think one of the helpful things that I learned while I was doing my book, my first book was thinking about You know, a company like McDonald's, to draw this out of agriculture and maybe remove a little bit of the kind of like sensitive emotional issues to give us a framework.
00:33:50
Speaker
You know, McDonald's almost went out of business or or was in kind of dire financial straits in the 1960s and 1970s because they just couldn't figure out how to make really cheap hamburgers. a profitable thing.
00:34:01
Speaker
They were like, i don't understand how selling like really inexpensive stuff like just can't make us huge profits. They're famously like a guy, ah they brought in like a finance guy who looked at their books and they're like, ah, see, the thing is, you think that you're a hamburger company when really you're a real estate company.
00:34:16
Speaker
you own all these franchise locations and like you are mis-emphasizing the value that real estate is making over time. And that you can have a kind of like land appreciation model in addition to a sell hamburgers model.
00:34:32
Speaker
And when hamburgers aren't making you the most money, you can like lean on this appreciation and use it to use them kind kind of in a complimentary way to like grow the business over time. This is exactly how agriculture works, right? ah At least like modern capitalistic agriculture that we've had in America since the nineteen thirty s production agriculture, growing a crop every year and selling it often loses money.
00:34:55
Speaker
Often, like especially the more commoditized your thing is, the more common this is. This is like, unfortunately, like this is basic basic economics, like a highly commoditized thing will always, its price will always tend towards the cost of production and often falls below the cost of production, which means like literally you cannot make money on it.
00:35:14
Speaker
You have to lose money by growing it. That is a very tricky business to be in. It's like that is what subsistence agriculture was for most of human history. But yeah, it is. It's hard.
00:35:25
Speaker
So how farms make it work is through the appreciation of land, which is you own this property every year. It gets a little bit more valuable. You don't pay more, though. You just pay whatever your operating loan is.
00:35:37
Speaker
The thing is, when you are still like paying a mortgage and you're trying to make it work with negative money from your crop business, yeah, that feels very desperate. That feels like that's not fair. Like I can't afford my mortgage on the land. Like what am I supposed to, how am I supposed to like stay in this business? Like this isn't, these economics don't work out. And yes, that is true. They do not work out. Like the economics are bad.
00:35:58
Speaker
And that is unfortunately also why the rich... are like very stable because once you own land, the appreciation is just gravy, right? Like that you're, when you're no longer paying a mortgage, but the value of your property goes up every year, you can use that. You can leverage that to get more loans, to secure more loans, to get higher, to acquire more land, to further build, which makes your equipment more valuable because you can spread it over more, the costs over more acres.
00:36:23
Speaker
That's the like cycle of consolidation that like causes farms to get bigger and bigger and bigger. There is no answer to that. There is ah other than getting bigger. This is capitalism. That is the only thing you can do in that system.
00:36:35
Speaker
Besides breaking out of capitalism, there is no solution that is like, oh, you can stay 2000 acres and you can afford to buy those acres and pay for it with the income from selling corn.
00:36:48
Speaker
You can't. You can't reliably. You need some other income. And this is why, right, when we think of this mid-scale commodity farm that can't make it where everyone needs to have an off-farm job or at least want somebody in the farm needs to have an off-farm job. And like, you know, half the time you're paying...
00:37:03
Speaker
Farm bills with like money from somewhere else. You're personally subsidizing the operation. That's what's happening. You are subsidizing the farm operation because the only way this market works is by being able to survive years when the the price in the market is below the cost of production by leveraging the value of the growth of land. And if you don't own the land because you haven't been it on the farm for 100 years, there's no meaningful way out of that.
00:37:33
Speaker
And also to kind of really realize and the the value of the land. And I think that's that's the situation a lot of farmers find themselves in today. you You need to sell it, right? So you're sitting on this asset that went from whatever it might be, 2 million to 10 million,
00:37:48
Speaker
That could be a lot of capital for you. The only way to realize that, though, it would be to sell that land. As I'm sure you know, like, you know, we're in a situation today where we have a lot of like retiring farmers that are sitting on land that has a lot of value that in some cases would love to pass it on to their kids. In other cases, you know, there are is no kid that wants to take it on, but there's no way for them to pass it on to a young farmer that would want to continue their legacy while selling it for its market value.
00:38:20
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the other thing we're seeing there is the desire amongst a lot of folks, which like can work in some situations. I'm not saying it can ever work, but the desire to not sell the land. To like, I want someone else to farm it. I want to rent it out.
00:38:34
Speaker
I want to make passive income on the land now, especially as I'm retired or I'm going, whatever the reasons are. And I think that's very tricky because, again, because of what I just described, because you need to be accruing the growing value of the land to yourself.
00:38:50
Speaker
But like when you are a farmer, especially what we want to think about the way that we would love, I think, I think it's safe to say on a podcast like this, if we want new and beginning farmers to like do regenerative practices and make these investments in soil health and like do all these, all this good work that, you is good for the land and like creates extra value in the land and like product productive value, how can they do that while they're pay paying rent?
00:39:16
Speaker
Where the value that they're creating is accruing to an owner and not to themselves. like Then you're paying rent twice. I'm paying rent because I'm a good manager and because I'm working really hard and then I owe you money also?
00:39:29
Speaker
The economics of that proposition are bad and I get why, especially new and beginning farmers who are just trying to make it work often come up against a wall where they're like, I would love to farm this way. i would love to no-till and do cover crops and more perennial stuff and like really diversify my operation. I can't.
00:39:46
Speaker
I can't do it on someone else's property. And I don't have like the literal like time and resources to put into it because the money's just not
Land Ownership and Emotional Ties
00:39:56
Speaker
there. Like at the end of the day, again, people have cell phone bills to pay and health insurance that they need to afford.
00:40:01
Speaker
i don't know. All of the like organic farming in the world like feels great and like it's what people want to do. But if you can't afford to do it, that that's just the end of the conversation. You can't afford to.
00:40:13
Speaker
And before we started recording for this podcast, I asked you the question of like, what is an issue today that you feel is not talked about enough? And you mentioned land, the fact that if we want to think seriously about how do we create a more resilient, fair and ecological food system, we need to not only talk about the practices that are done on top of the soil, but also how land is distributed.
00:40:38
Speaker
what What is the framework that kind of shapes that? Could you talk a little bit more about that and maybe kind of ways to think about that moving into the future? Yeah.
00:40:49
Speaker
Since I've been working on the podcast series, you mentioned the only thing that lasts. This has been a big thing that I've been thinking about and exploring with folks all over the place from legal professionals to farmers to native advocates and activists about, yeah, what is what does the future look like? Where what are people doing with land in other places?
00:41:08
Speaker
How could we rethink this system of consolidation, which like really feels like it only moves one way? How do you like deconsolidate? Which is interesting. It comes back to that idea that, right, that land resists capitalism in some ways, because in an ideal world, right, like the pressures of the market, I think free market people would say when land gets too expensive, when like taxes get too high or whatever that looks like, you'll just sell land because that's it makes financial sense to do that.
00:41:36
Speaker
To the point you just made about like, you know, if you have 5000 acres and you're not cash flowing and the commodity prices are too low, like obviously you'll just sell land. But nobody does. people will like do anything they have to do other jobs, like subsidize in whatever way they need to, to hold onto the land people. I mean, in in part because of the emotional connection, the familial connection, like the kind of like social pressure. There's so many reasons that people do that, but like the reality is people don't sell land.
00:42:02
Speaker
they hang on to it to the ends of the earth. Like people who haven't been, their family hasn't lived on a farm in four or five generations are still holding onto land. People will not part with it. So when you think about it that way, and the fact that that is possible, right? That I can like sit in my apartment in New York city and still own 2000 acres in Iowa because my great, great grandfather did.
00:42:23
Speaker
And i can still make income every year. owning it. And I've never been there. I don't know anything about it. I might even still qualify for farm subsidies on that land, depending on how we think about management and how involved I am in the operations. But that point aside,
00:42:40
Speaker
deconsolidation feels like a problem that like, I don't know how you overcome it. it's It's getting worse. It's not getting better, despite the fact that we've known about it all this time. Everything that people are trying seems very marginal. And at the same time, like, it's really hard to find someone who's at fault.
00:42:54
Speaker
When you think about, okay, old farmers, they've been farming their whole lives. They own one thousand acres in Iowa. They've put in the work. Now they want to retire. They want to sell the land for the most that they can. That's their whole retirement.
00:43:06
Speaker
is just is tied up in the value of the land. But we also want them to sell for a price that as a young beginning farmer could afford. So like, who's going to take the hit? Are we going to sentence someone to like a retirement they can't afford?
00:43:18
Speaker
Or are we going to sentence a young farmer to living their whole life in debt? They're both bad. Like those are both bad outcomes. and And because of that, I think this is like a very ah hairy problem to try and deconstruct. It's easy when we think like, oh, the only person who owns land is like Bill Gates. Let's just take it all away from Bill Gates. But but that's the thing. Most farmland is owned by individuals.
00:43:37
Speaker
And it's like that. It's like people's retirement. It was an investment. They bought it. They've been depending on it or they but plan to continue to depend on it. So I think one of the ways that we can rethink farmland is by stop thinking about it as a financial asset or rethink the way that the growth in farmland value over time works.
00:43:55
Speaker
This is like a very old idea from like the eighteen hundred s that like the reason that property of values appreciate, the reason why land becomes more valuable is because of society. You build roads, things get closer, there's more stores, you know there's nice parks, there's nice like wild places you can go to.
00:44:10
Speaker
that technically is not society, but the fact that they're accessible and that they're nice and maintained is. And so there's like an idea that you know we could think about instead of appreciation accruing to private property owners, it appreciates to society. We built the roads.
00:44:25
Speaker
We made this land more valuable by like building the amenities and community around it that is making it more valuable. So why should like that value accumulate to private landowners and not to the community?
00:44:36
Speaker
One idea of how to do that in practice would be to tax appreciation. Your land appreciated 3% this year. now you have to a 3% tax on the land.
00:44:46
Speaker
And that is collected by your municipality and they can use that to build more roads and to maintain the ones they have and to like make communities like a better place to live. The most powerful thing about that kind of switch is it takes all the benefit out of speculation.
00:45:00
Speaker
speculation in farmland is a huge problem. I mean, speculation in all real estate is a huge problem, but especially in communities, especially in vulnerable areas where buying up farmland, the next county over from Chicago is a good investment because in 50 years, Chicago will be right there.
00:45:16
Speaker
But people are farming right there also and would like to have access to that land and like would like to grow their own operations and their wealth. And like the fact that like outside speculators are looking at 50 years down the line and thinking about if I get in now, like I can expect so much growth over this period of time and that's great.
00:45:32
Speaker
That's a problem for the community of people who actually live there. So that's one thing we could do. I mean, in other places, the fundamental just like rethinking of what it means to have private property and what public property rights are.
00:45:44
Speaker
You know, in Scotland, they recently firmed up the national right to roam, which is basically like you cannot prevent a Scottish person from wandering in Scotland. This whole country is ours. We are members of this country. Like you can't like camp, you can't loiter, you can't destroy people's like built environment.
00:46:03
Speaker
But like it can still be private property and people can walk on it and like enjoy the country that they call home. That is like a very simple kind of way to help people like rethink and challenge.
00:46:14
Speaker
What does it mean to have private property? The kind of private property that we have in America is like a very kind of unique kind of private property in the world where it's like no trespassing. You can be like, once you've trespassed in a lot of States, like people have the right to kill you.
00:46:30
Speaker
That's wild. That when you think about that, like that is a wild type of freedom and type of like private property protection. So we could in a lot of big ways. I mean, I just talked to a researcher last week, actually, who we were talking about.
00:46:43
Speaker
His question was, you know, we have federal grazing land. We have, Property that's owned by the public, by the federal government that is rented out to ranchers to graze cattle on in the West.
00:46:54
Speaker
There's a lot of BLM um land in the West that is permitted out. Why is there no public farmland? We could have it. There's no reason you can't have public farmland. And like you rented, it like you would apply or bid potentially on like a ah permit to have access to some land that you could rent from the government.
00:47:12
Speaker
Then when you're done with it, goes back to the government and they could rent it out to someone new. That would be an amazing way to get new beginning farmers into agriculture because it would be a kind of fundamentally different arrangement, right? Not because the government can rent land at a non-extractive rate, but private landowners would never do that because it doesn't make economic sense to not extract if you can.
00:47:34
Speaker
When I think about the future of like private property and farmland and how things could be different, like, yes, there's Things I talked about in my book like community ownership or cooperative ownership, and employee ownership of farms.
00:47:44
Speaker
You can think about kind of like private business structures that already exist that we could just take from other sectors and put in agriculture. But we could also think a lot bigger and a lot differently about the way that private property works, the way Public property rights could be expanded and the role that the public and like the government could have. i don't know. This is a kind of a wild time to be thinking about the role that the federal government can have at anything.
00:48:09
Speaker
ah But we could have think fundamentally differently about like who owns farmland, what its value is to the public and how to. make it so it's not all captured by speculators, private landowners, and just like people who who get stuck in this trap where they are extracting from themselves to stay in a desperate situation because it feels like that's like the best they can do in a situation that's just like very sticky and tricky. I mean, we could do stuff different if we wanted to.
00:48:38
Speaker
kind of relate to that, maybe there's also a question of kind of reclaiming. I mean, you talked about the retiring farmer that needs money to retire, the young farmer that needs a good deal to be able to get started. And it's like zero sum game where it's like, who takes the hit?
00:48:54
Speaker
You know, maybe part of the answer is also kind of reclaiming farming from the kind of quote unquote free market or whatever, and kind of retaking accountability for it as a broader public so that it doesn't just fall in the hands of the farmers. Like thinking about like, what can we as society more broadly, what can the government do to kind of help in this so that it's not just this entire large question of, you know, how do we grow food and feed the world doesn't just fall on the shoulders of farmers. Yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
Totally. And I think i think the populists showed that. And I think where we are i now kind of shows too. Again, like agriculture and the distribution of food and access to food has always been something that just like resists capitalism. I mean, I think with most other things you can say like,
00:49:42
Speaker
Well, people should work hard if they want more, if they want better quality stuff. Like you want better clothes, like work hard, make more money, get better clothes. I think it's really hard to have a heart and like a moral center and say that about food.
00:49:56
Speaker
People deserve food. People don't deserve to starve to death. Like, I don't know that is it doesn't feel like a very controversial thing. And yet, like we do debate at every farm bill whether or not some people deserve to starve to death.
00:50:09
Speaker
But that's that's not about the farming, though. Food production is not our problem, right? Like food distribution is our problem. But food production, we've got that down. It seems like that's a it's probably a different side of things is the the how to get food to the people that that need to have it.
00:50:30
Speaker
It also seems that. I mean, right now, like you like you said, do we really want the federal government to be more involved with how land is distributed? i could imagine right now a a system where if the federal government owns more land, that it's really just you been given up to the highest bidder.
00:50:49
Speaker
That feels right right about now, circa 2025 when we're recording this. I don't know if if that's going to help us with this problem at this given point. Yeah, I mean, I agree, which really gets to like a bigger point about any kind of like collective cooperative community like ah level thing, right? Is that it's always open to its moment.
00:51:11
Speaker
Like communities and collectives are only as strong as their organization at any given time. And I think New Belgium was an employee owned company, might still technically be an employee owned company, but employee owned for a long time.
00:51:24
Speaker
had a lot of employee owners over the period of time. The one thing that they did not do was ask their employees to give up their stake when they stopped being employees. So when they were when the company was approached by a Chinese investor that wanted to buy the company, they had to put it to a vote legally of their all their owners.
00:51:41
Speaker
And there were more owners who no longer worked at the company than there were current employees who were owners. So obviously all the current employees who were owners said, I'd like to continue owning the place that I work at. It's how I have my like rights in the workplace. It's how I protect my job. It's how I feel engaged like in this work.
00:52:00
Speaker
But all the non and no longer employees said, I'd love the payout, please. I'd like the money. That is what I'd like to have. And they sold. And I think that is like a really important object lesson. And like, there is no silver bullet.
00:52:14
Speaker
Employee ownership, collective ownership is also tricky. Like you have to set it up, right? You have to keep people engaged. You have to remind people like, what was the point in doing this in the first place? Like, why was this important to us? And is that still important to us now? I think it takes an incredible amount of emotional maturity.
00:52:30
Speaker
I think it takes ah an incredible amount of soft work around just organizing that people, we don't have a good way of valuing in like our current capitalist system.
00:52:41
Speaker
I think it's deeply uncomfortable most of the time. It turns out when power is distributed evenly, when people don't like something, they get to stand up and say so. And that feels uncomfortable.
00:52:52
Speaker
Most people don't have a lot of experience in that because we live in command and control structures most of our lives where like someone's in charge and they get to say and everyone else does it. And when those kind of power structures break down, we get into like an emotionally uncomfortable area where we just want someone to be in charge and just want someone to tell us what to do.
00:53:10
Speaker
And so, yes, I think the federal government is perhaps not the the group that we want in charge of this, but I think the the concerns that we have right now about the federal government would come up eventually with any kind of non-individual ownership organization.
00:53:25
Speaker
What it takes is like building the skills to navigate it. We've talked a good bit about how really challenging farming and land access, like getting into land at the current moment, it is really, really challenging to get into land and it seems to keep consolidating.
Entry for New Farmers
00:53:43
Speaker
I wonder if there's very different ways that land is consolidating and that getting into farming is depending on what type of farming you're trying to get into, right?
00:53:54
Speaker
Because if you're coming into farming from the suburbs and you didn't grow up on a farm and you don't have assets and a lot of cash, you're probably never going to get into commodity crop farming.
00:54:05
Speaker
That ship has sailed. Like that seems like is really only for landowners who have family land, who have family money and assets and wealth. And those people can continue playing that game. And it's a commodity game. And there's really not a whole lot of money to be made in there anyway.
00:54:20
Speaker
Tons of investment that you would need to make, I mean, and at least in terms of the return on your assets, the return on your investment is pretty small in commodity farming. Probably just are never going to touch that. like That will probably, from the looks of it, continue to consolidate, whereas ah easier entry point would probably vegetable farming. Like vegetable farming has been the entry point for people who grew up in the suburbs and wanted to be in farming because you only need to have half an acre or several acres.
00:54:51
Speaker
And then the next step up would seem to be growing livestock on marginal land. That's a whole lot less expensive than commodity corn crop, corn land.
00:55:02
Speaker
Maybe you can rent it. Maybe you can buy it. So it seems like that might be less taxable. tied to this trend of consolidation that doesn't seem to have an end and might be more able to put that back into the hands of more people while commodity corn and and grain growing will probably have its own trajectory. Does that seem about right?
00:55:29
Speaker
I think so, though I would hesitate around. The thing about fruits and vegetables is though there is certainly an entry point there. I mean, not least because a lot of people own enough property who don't use it for agricultural purposes at all to grow like a meaningful amount of vegetables.
00:55:44
Speaker
There's a lot of like 40 acre, what what do you call Ranchettes, is that the like fun real estate word for them? Where it's like, it's it's most people just keep them in like really big lawns, I think, or like some woods perhaps.
00:55:56
Speaker
To your point, like five acres of vegetables is a lot of vegetables. A commercial-sized vegetable farm like in California might be, might, ah ah a huge one is like 300 acres. And that is like millions and millions of dollars on the line every year out there in the field, and usually in strawberries somehow.
00:56:14
Speaker
There is a little bit of a different situation in vegetables. I do think there is still a limit in terms of scale. And that is not due necessarily to consolidation. I would say it's due to our patterns of trade.
00:56:27
Speaker
Vegetable farming has been declining in the United States for decades. It is at its lowest levels, essentially like of all time. right now. And it's because like, you cannot grow tomatoes in the United States as cheapest. They can grow them in Latin America.
00:56:39
Speaker
Can't grow blueberries. You can't grow strawberry. There's literally nothing you can grow here less than you can grow them in Peru and ship them on a plane. I see this a lot when people get to a scale with vegetable farming, where they're like, how do I serve hospitals?
00:56:51
Speaker
How do I serve schools? How do I like get to a place where I can do this kind of slightly larger scale? And it's like, you can't, It's like CSA, like that's that's your niche is really what it is.
00:57:03
Speaker
But beyond CSA, there's yeah there's there's really not much there for someone who's doing produce here in the United States. Yeah, maybe maybe some restaurants, but it's going to be limited. the logistical costs of just driving around to restaurants every week, every day, sometimes like that's expensive and it's hard on your body and your time. So, yes, I do think there are other spaces where there is less consolidation in land. But I do also think that we don't appreciate always in the agricultural consolidation story that there's a lot of other things consolidating land other than farming. Right. Like,
00:57:35
Speaker
People just like big rural properties. People want to hunt. People want conservation land. Conservation land is a huge pressure, like preserving green spaces, especially around cities and in suburbs and in the exurbs. Like people want parks and empty fields and that land could be farms.
00:57:50
Speaker
and now it's not. And that's tricky. Like I did an interview last week about how conservation easements contribute to lack of land availability because big large landowners, this has been especially prominent in the Southeast who have 5,000 acres can say, you know, I have 2000 acres of pretty marginal land that I can't really use that well to to grow commodity crop, but I don't wanna sell it because nobody ever sells farmland.
00:58:16
Speaker
And so what I can do is set up a conservation easement put it all in like ecological conservation and then get out of the tax bill. Because I've owned it for, my family's owned it for a hundred years. The tax is all I was paying.
00:58:29
Speaker
So now that I have a deep discount on my taxes, as long as I don't farm it, which I wasn't making any money farming it anyways, now I can hold onto this extra thousand acres forever. as long as I don't farm it, which is easy to do. But the thing is like, it's still on my books, right? So again, I can use it to get loans. I can use it to like, as like part of my wealth base, but now it's taken off of like the potential that like someone else could have bought it. Someone else could have farmed it. Someone else could have, you know, healed it, done repairs, do some regenerative activity that could have made it better for farming.
00:59:00
Speaker
But now it's locked up in a conservation easement forever.
Sustainability and Technological Advances
00:59:04
Speaker
You know, one of the broader themes, auto all of this elucidates, and I think something that also you touched on in your first book, Farm and Other F-Words, is just the unfortunate reality that the unit economics of farming, for a number of reasons,
00:59:23
Speaker
don't really work today for most people. Yes, there are, you know, particular people that have found a specific niche for themselves that works. There's others that have, you know, they have enough land that it works for them. But for the vast majority kind of across the spectrum,
00:59:39
Speaker
it does not like the unit economics are absolutely terrible. And that, you know, if we want to think seriously about how to make it work, it's a whole host of political and economic choices that we need to make to restructure in a way that makes sense. And, and, you know, there's tons of levers that one could pull from public lands to changing how conservation easements are doing to, you know, institutional buying programs, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the the the list is long,
01:00:08
Speaker
To finish maybe on like a brighter note than just the unit economics don't work for farming. I'm wondering if you could maybe leave us with something that you view as hopeful that you're seeing right now in the farming space. Obviously, you're a journalist. You write a lot about a lot of things going on. You talk to a lot of people.
01:00:25
Speaker
What are some of the most optimistic trends you're seeing happening now that, you know, you think people should be paying attention to? That is a tricky one.
01:00:36
Speaker
ha This is going to sound like not optimistic at first, but I promise it'll hopefully come back around. I want to I feel like we're at a moment historically where we're starting to act and talk a little bit more grown up.
01:00:57
Speaker
And that's like, feels like a weird thing to say, but like, especially, you know, one of the the places where I do a lot, I pay a lot of attention and do a lot of work is in the ag tech space. And I do feel like the ag tech space has been, man, an exhausting space of just like,
01:01:13
Speaker
vertical farms are the new, are going to save the world. And like, oh, we're making, we're making protein from air in a lab somewhere. And like, that's how we're going to do the future. And there's always like this techno-optimist view of like, it's fine because all of agriculture is going to collapse into nothingness, but we're still going to have food because we made it in a lab.
01:01:30
Speaker
It's funny. I have not read the book Abundance, the new book by Derek Thompson, but I've heard a lot about it. And I heard that there is, they talk about vertical farming in the intro. And I was just like, oh no, not this again. Like, this is,
01:01:42
Speaker
I thought that died last year. I thought plenty, the death of plenty for sure. After they, I don't know, did Lord knows what with a billion dollars and then still failed.
01:01:53
Speaker
I would think that would have been the end of it, but we're still talking about it. I will say the collapse of plenty, the final bankruptcy there and like ah some other things, you know, the alt protein like got really frothy and then it's really died down a lot.
01:02:05
Speaker
I feel like has really disrupted a bit and created like a little bit of and maturity for people in this space to talk about like, okay, there's no like there's no quick fix. There's no silver bullet. We're not going to say, cool, we're going to like ride out agriculture to its demise.
01:02:20
Speaker
And then we're going to be saved by like some new tech that figured it out. I feel like we're moving past that kind of like naive understanding. And we're moving into like a more grown up space of like,
01:02:31
Speaker
okay, like, let's talk about, let's talk about capitalism. Let's talk about politics. Let's talk about some of these like deeper issues that are hairy and gross. And like, yeah, let's talk about like how farmers need land for retirement and how young farmers can't afford it.
01:02:44
Speaker
Let's talk about how farmers need higher prices for what they sell and poor people can't afford food. Like, let's talk about the space between those two things. And the answer is not a software that gives me hope.
01:02:57
Speaker
There's no hero coming in. Yes. There's no Iron Man who's going to wave his Elon magic wand and like fix it all for us. Like we're going to fix it in our communities, in our spaces. Like we're going to, you know, especially when I think about the land, which I have been a lot.
01:03:11
Speaker
I talked to a ah legal scholar early on who talked about the difference between space and place. You know, capitalism has over the last like 70, 80, 100 years turned a lot of places in America into spaces, empty spaces where it's just like this is just like miles and miles of corn. No one comes here. No one
Emotional Connection and Future Discussions
01:03:28
Speaker
stays here. No one knows this land.
01:03:29
Speaker
I mean, I think that's one of the the fatal flaws of like a vertical farm idea. It's not a place. People love farming and farmland because it's a place and we feel like a deep emotional, personal connection to it, not because it grows food, but because it's like part of who we are.
01:03:47
Speaker
And you can't replace that with LED lights and a software. Like it's human to be, to want to make a place and to have a place where you feel safe and secure and part of something and part of something greater than yourself.
01:04:00
Speaker
And I think we are starting to like, have not just like the the touchy-feely beautiful words of that idea. I think people are really starting to say, like that's something I'm willing to fight for.
01:04:14
Speaker
And like I'm willing to talk about like what I'm willing to sacrifice for that. And I'd like to have a grown up conversation about like how much it might cost. And like, I'm willing to pay and not just pay dollars or get some like philanthropic money to like have it paid for them. I think people are starting to think about like what sacrifices are me and my community willing to make of like our time, our effort, giving up like other experiences of the world to like make place here.
01:04:39
Speaker
And to me, that's like a very hopeful, it's kind of like a sober hopefulness, but it, I don't know, but it feels real. And I like that. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for your general work in the broader space in farming and also taking time to have this conversation with us.
01:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me. it was fun.
01:05:00
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
01:05:10
Speaker
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