2024 - Agriculture
I grew up on a family farm. My ancestors who pioneered the area were all farmers. My great grandfather plowed his fields near Desoto with a team of horses. We are far from the days when “40 acres and a mule” was enough to sustain a family. Gone are the days of my youth when our family put thousands of bales of hay in the hay mow and a family farm could sustain themselves on 300 acres. Today we are looking at a family farm requiring over 1000 acres of tilled ground to sustain a single household. If we are talking about a father/son farm with two households, that number is doubled. The cost of grain, chemicals, fuel, and equipment continues to rise as prices farmers are paid for their product continues to fall. The main cause for this is that the markets have become monopolized.
· Four companies control 75% of the meat markets (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield-WH Group, a Chinese company)
· Three seed companies sell more than 75% of corn and soybean seed (Corteva, Bayer, and Syngenta)
· Four companies control 90% of the grain markets (Cargill, ADM, Bunge, and Dreyfus)
This causes farmers to get paid less for their products as competition for those products has been eliminated. The competition for purchasing what they need to produce our food is less, so they pay higher prices. Families have filed for bankruptcy at an alarming rate over the past decade. Their land has been sold to corporate agriculture which is destroying our farming communities which have existed since our pioneer days. We need to fight for our rights to enforce anti-trust laws at the federal level by getting our State Attorney General to file Federal lawsuits against the monopolies. We need to provide programs that can keep the family farm alive while the monopolies are brought into control. We need to limit the expansion of factory farming. We need to ensure that as technology becomes available to create better productivity, it is available to small farming families. As electric technology replaces liquid fuel based equipment, we need to be sure that liquid fuels are available at affordable prices as this changeover will not be quick. We will require the need for better rural broadband as new equipment will require it for efficient production. Regardless of talking points, broadband needs to be seen as a utility and made a priority just as providing electricity to rural areas was 90 years ago. And as a state government, we need to be working to make policy that strengthens family farms and stops the monopolization and consolidation of our most precious resource of food production into corporate entities. Increasing competition for our agricultural products promotes better capitalism, and this is what Hoosier farmers need to start prospering again.
