A handful of giant corporations such as Cargill and JBS have control of agriculture; from what farmers pay for seeds and fertilizer to what they are paid for their finished products. As a result, the farmer gets squeezed at both ends, from input to output. I explained in my last letter how the Trump administration prioritized these corporations over small family farms. In this letter, I would like to outline some of the ways the Biden-Harris administration is helping small farmers.
The Biden-Harris administration strengthened farmers’ bargaining position when dealing with these large corporations and has made antitrust a central theme. For example, the Trump administration greenlit both the Bayer-Monsanto merger, which created the world’s largest company for vegetable seeds, cotton seeds, and herbicides, and the Dow-DuPont merger, which created the largest ag-biotech and seed firm in the U.S. The Biden-Harris administration sued to block the merger of supermarket chains Kroger and Albertsons. Farm Action stated: “A successful merger between the two companies would leave dairy farmers with fewer places to sell their milk and grant Kroger-Albertsons with untold power to command lower prices. As a result, independent producers would inevitably be forced out of business.” The Biden-Harris administration also filed legal action against Koch Foods Inc. to prevent them from requiring chicken farmers to pay a “termination penalty” for switching to a different processor.
President Biden has issued an executive order directing the FTC to go after corporate “right to repair” restrictions that prevent farmers and ranchers from doing their own maintenance on equipment. It is no accident that under the Biden-Harris administration, net farm incomes have gone up from $94 billion in the years between 2017 and 2019 to $165 billion between 2021 and 2023.
Our local farmers and farm communities are economically more healthy under the Biden-Harris administration.
