The nation has seen its total number of farmers and farmland decrease over the past five years and advocates for smaller producers in South Dakota said new data indicates more challenges for farming communities.

This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its Census of Agriculture. Since the 2017 report, the nation's number of farms shrank by nearly 150,000 and total farmland dropped by 20 million acres. However, the average farm size increased, pointing to concerns about industrial farms gaining more ground.

Karla Hofhenke, executive director of the South Dakota Farmers Union, said it shows farmers, especially independent operations, need effective policies to keep working their land.

"Farmers will produce more and more with less acres, and so it's important that we keep the support of the Farm Bill programs going for them," Hofhenke contended

Congress faces a deadline later this year to adopt a new Farm Bill, and Hofhenke suggested enhancing programs offering conservation incentives is one way to prop up family farms.

South Dakota saw its total number of farms decrease by nearly 1,700 and total acreage was down by nearly 940,000.

Hofhenke emphasized if more small towns see family farms replaced by larger operations with no connection to the community, the towns will lose their identity.

"You start losing your schools in those local towns and when you lose your schools, you're losing your town because the young families are moving away," Hofhenke observed.

Larger farming companies said being able to grow in size allows them to meet global demand for food. Meanwhile, the average farmer age went up in the new report. However, there was an 11% increase in the number of beginning farmers, with experts noting it could help ease the burden of not having enough people to replace producers nearing retirement.


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October is National Farm to School Month, and New York schools are using grant funding to participate.

School districts statewide have received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Local Food for Schools program. These grants allow schools to buy food directly from local or regional farmers, so kids have nutritious meals.

Jenny Lester Moffitt, undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the USDA, said this program allows farmers to get more of the "food dollar" back by selling their wares directly.

"So traditionally, a farmer gives about 14 cents of every food dollar back to their farming operation," she said. "But when farmers can sell locally, direct to their community, selling direct to their schools, more of the food dollar comes back to their farm."

She said it also provides them with a reliable and stable place to sell their products.

This year, New York school districts received more than $700,000 in grant funding from the Patrick Leahy Farm to School program. Lester Moffitt noted that a future goal is to expand the program.

This week, the USDA announced an additional $500 million for the grants, with another $200 million for child-care facilities to purchase directly from farms.

Feedback about the program has been positive from farmers and schools. From speaking with food producers, Lester Moffitt said it's been a safety net for them, especially those who have lost other local or international markets. Despite its benefits, she said, there are some challenges for farmers.

"There are barriers, especially if you're a small producer; if you're a producer that has one product to be able to sell directly to schools in the neighborhood and into the region," she said. "Farmers are often very busy farming and harvesting, and don't have a lot of time to be able to make all those different phone calls and deliver products."

Funds are also provided for farmers and schools to overcome these barriers. One solution is an aggregation system, where farmers can bring their products to one location to be distributed to different schools.

A new report looking at agribusiness consolidation found decades of mergers have reduced competition, leading to higher costs for farmers and consumers in Maryland and nationwide.

The report, titled "Kings Over the Necessaries of Life," showed a smaller number of large companies are using their market power to dominate nearly all sectors of the food system from inputs such as seeds and pesticides all the way to grocers.

Basel Musharbash, principal attorney for the Antimonopoly Counsel and the report's author, said the nonenforcement of the nation's antimonopoly laws since the 1980s has taken a toll.

"We found that either a single firm or a small, tightly coordinated group of firms have amassed monopoly power," Musharbash explained. "The power to control prices or exclude competitors from a given market, in nearly every major industry that manufactures and sells farm inputs, that buys or processes farm crops, or that distributes food to the public."

Among other abuses, the report found companies have engineered shortages to keep prices high, as in the egg and fertilizer sectors. Despite rising prices for beef, consolidation has reduced the share of the consumer's dollar going to cattle farmers, which fell from 70% in the 1970s to 30% today.

The fertilizer sector has been gradually consolidated over decades, and the report showed three large firms are now in control. With one dominating the market for each of the three primary components of fertilizer: nitrogen, phosphate and potassium. The so-called Big Three are able to control prices in their respective markets but are also keeping competition out by controlling access to both the raw materials supply and the specialized distributors that sell fertilizer around the country.

The report found since the 1990s, the Big Three have raised fertilizer prices, cut output and reduced the quality and selection of fertilizer available in the U.S. Fertilizer prices increased 60% in 2021 and 132% the next year. Companies attributed the increases to supply-chain problems, but Musharbash found their own financial reports proved otherwise. He argued it amounts to extraction from farmers and ultimately, consumers.

"Because of their power, they've been able to reap Apple-style profits on products that haven't been improved materially since the 1960s," Musharbash asserted. "It's that sort of extraction that has been facilitated by the monopolization that we've seen across the agriculture sector."

The report includes an Agriculture Consolidation Data Hub where different sectors are outlined. Consolidation and its effects are tracked in agricultural finance, crop insurance, farm machinery, the grain and oilseed sector, along with fruits, vegetables, livestock, poultry, seed and fertilizer. The seed industry is now dominated by four large firms and has seen prices rise faster over the past 20 years than any other farm input.

Musharbash argued the nation needs to continue to expand recent efforts to enforce antitrust laws.

"It doesn't have to be this way," Musharbash contended. "These firms are smart and powerful. They've executed strategies over decades, the U.S. government allowed it because we made policy decisions not to enforce the antitrust laws to the fullest extent. We can take action to fix that."

He added after a period of neglect, the agriculture sector was also highly concentrated by the 1930s. But the report outlined how over a decade the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission brought thousands of cases against cartel actors in the agricultural economy, eventually restoring competitive markets.


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Advocates for a fair, sustainable, and healthy food system have released a report showing that nearly all of the corn seed in Iowa is controlled by just four companies.

Economists say concentrations that large can lead to market manipulation.

Farm Action's report shows nearly 90% of the corn seed in Iowa is controlled by Corteva and Bayer. AgReliant and Syngenta control the rest.

Farm Action President Angela Huffman said that kind of control and concentration is happening all the way from seeds to the consumer's plate, and she warns it makes market conditions ripe for abuse.

"This is the scenario in almost every sector of the food supply chain," said Huffman. "Seeds, fertilizer, farm equipment - beef, pork, and poultry processing - and retail groceries. Every one of those sectors I just named has upwards of 60%, to even 85%, of those markets controlled by four corporations."

The same type of consolidation is happening in ag operations where livestock are raised in large confinements - and manure runoff is known to damage the air, ground, and surface water in rural Iowa.

Operators have said they're always looking for more efficient and environmentally friendly ways to raise livestock.

Huffman argued that monopolies like this can lead to collusion, price fixing, and other types of market manipulation.

She and other advocates have called on lawmakers in Congress to address the issue in the pending Farm Bill.

"We're calling on the government to reclaim its role as an enforcer of our antitrust laws, and break up these dominant corporations," said Huffman, "in order to free our economy to start working for the people who are producing, processing and distributing our food."

The current Farm Bill, which was supposed to expire in September of last year, has been extended - but debate still hasn't started on a new version.




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