On this Labor Day, let’s honor the people who do the hard agricultural work that brings food to our tables.
Image from Vecteezy.
I was interested to see this report. Here’s why this matters:
As can be seen, concentration across all six sectors remains high. Five of them – seeds, pesticides, machinery, animal pharma and pig genetics – meet the definition of an oligopoly, in which four companies control more than 40% of a market. So too does the global market for phosphate fertilisers. While the world grapples with the climate and biodiversity crises, rising hunger levels, geopolitical conflict and another looming food crisis, a handful of large companies continue to hold enormous power over our food system.
And here’s a quick summary:
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What ever happened to trust-busting? Bring it back!
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Arriving Sept 8. For a 30% discount, pre-order here using code UCPSAVE30.
I saw this on AgWeb:
I knew this came from USDA’s Food Dollar series, which reports measurements of where the food dollar goes in the chain of production.
The USDA also illustrates the dollar in reports. The most recent, with figures from 2023, is here.
These USDA illustrations used to be easier to read, so I like the way AgWeb shows the current data.
But you get the idea: farmers don’t get much. The real money in food is in processing, retail, and service.
Note the incentive in processing.
No wonder the number of farms continues to decline.
What the Farm Bill (an apparently hopeless cause at the moment) really needs to do is to start from scratch and do two things: promote smaller scale organic and regenerative farming that will protect soil, mitigate climate change, and repopulate the Midwest, and make sure those farmers make an adequate living.
Ray Goldberg died last week at the age of 99. He was still going pretty strong the last time I saw him last fall at the annual meeting of PAPSAC (Private and Public Scientific, Academic and Consumer Food Policy Group) at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Edmund O’Keeffe, photo
We were an unlikely pair to know each other for so long and to care about each other so deeply.
When I first met him in the early 1990s, Ray was professor of agribusiness (a term he coined) at the Harvard Business School, as representative of Big Ag as anyone could be. When he invited me to participate in the newly formed PAPSAC, I could not imagine why he would want me there or why I should go.
Contrary to Ray’s recollection, I did not attend the first meeting. I would have had to pay my own expenses, which seemed outrageous given that so many of the participants were CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies and flew to Boston via private jet.
The second year, Ray said they would pay for my travel and persuaded me that the meeting would be worth attending. Its purpose, he explained, was to bring food business leaders and consumer activists together to share views and to reach mutual understanding.
My interpretation: Ray thought that if we saw how caring the CEOs of agribusiness firms were about feeding the world, we would not object so much to what they did. That never worked, but he kept on trying. And I kept on attending, for more than 25 years.
My rationale:
Two highlights:
Despite what I consider to be a total contradiction between the profit goals of agribusiness and the goals of public healthl, Ray continued to insist that we all needed to listen to each other.
His sunny view of humanity is best illustrated by his book Food Citizenship, which I wrote about in 2018 when it first came out.
The book consists of Ray’s interviews with dozens of PAPSAC participants, beginning with his interview with me. [The interviews were videotaped and are available at the Oxford University Press website. The video of Ray’s interview with me is posted here.]
I always felt like a total outsider at this meeting, and was surprised to find myself at the core of Ray’s attempts to achieve mutual understanding among participants.
We could all use more of that.
As is clear from our interview and Ray’s response to my responses to his questions, we viewed the world of agribusiness very differently.
But I loved him, and will miss him.
John Seabrook. The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Norton, 2025 (346 pages).
This book is a memoir by New Yorker staff writer, John Seabrook, about his rich, unscrupulous, and bigoted grandfather and father but there is so much food politics in it that it belongs on my must-read list. It’s also a riveting story, well told.
Seabrook’s progenitors were notable for having figured out how to grow vegetables at a huge scale in southern New Jersey, and how to freeze them so they could be shipped, stored, and sold at great profit. Until things went bad, they were the largest vegetable growers on the eastern seabord, if not anywhere. This book has plenty to say about how they did it—bought seed, planted, harvested, froze, shipped.
It is also about who did the work and how the worker were treated—farm labor as viewed from the owners’ perspective (unshared by the author, who is unsparing in his reporting).
I learned a lot about industrial vegetable farming from reading this book.
C.F. [Seabrook’s grandfather] could not have chosen a better time to build his vegetable factory. Food prices, already rising in 1913, were further boosted by the outbreak of war in Europe, causing agricultural production abroad to contract severely. The price of a bushel of corn in Minnesota rose from 59 cents in 1914 to $1.30 in 1919. Wheat went from $1.05 a bushel to $2.34. Mechanization was bringing tractors, threshers, seed drillers, and combine harvesters to the cultivation of wheat, rye, oats, and barley, greatly increasing production. Land prices rose accordingly. (p.79)
I looked up today’s figures: Corn is $4.50 per bushel; wheat $5 to $6. No wonder our agricultural production system is such a mess and requires so much in subsidies.
The Seabrooks of that era were ungenerous with their workers, particularly those who were Black, and had to deal with a strike in 1934.
Eyewitnesses…claimed the Seabrooks and their henchman crushed the strike using fire hoses, tear gas, mass arrests, and imported gangster named Red Sanders, armed vigilantes, and the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, who spread terror by burning crosses in front of Black Workers’ homes. One ACLU observer reported seeing my uncle Belford, of whom I had only fond memories, leading a tear-gas attack on a striking worker’s house and setting it on fire with a woman and small children inside. (p. 109)
This must have been one tough book to write. Seabrook says it took him 30 years to dig out the history of his complicated family and come to terms with it. He did a great job. It’s a great read.
Reviews
If you are wondering about the effects of China’s not buying US soybeans (and the Trump administrations bailout of Argentinean soybeans), Farm Action says the real problem started decades ago.
Its analysis is well worth reading.
The numbers reveal how concentrated our agricultural system has become. In 2024:
- Soybeans were the number one U.S. agricultural export, worth about $24.5 billion.
- More than half of all U.S. soybeans were exported, and China historically bought more than half of that total (roughly $12.6 billion worth).
- Soybeans contributed $46.9 billion to total U.S. farm income.
The current crisis, it says, is “the result of decades of decisions that put export growth ahead of food security at home.”
Farm Action wants agricultural policies that will break the cycle of overproduction and bailouts.
- Grow food, not just livestock feed crops: Incentivize production of fruits, vegetables, and nutrient-dense crops for local markets.
- Reform subsidies: Redirect federal spending away from endless bailouts and toward programs that reward resilience and healthy food production.
- Rebuild local infrastructure: Invest in regional processing, storage, and distribution to give farmers alternatives to export markets.
- Break up corporate monopolies: Enforce antitrust laws to restore competition in input and processing markets.
How to do this, it does not say. But these goals are worth advocacy.
Start on them now.
We might get lucky.
Corporate Climate Resposibility Monitor has published its 2025 report: Food and Agriculture Sector Deep Dive, which looks at measures of protection against climate change. It doesn’t find much.
It does find:
Overall,
Not much green in this chart.
The report goes into detail for each of the companies it’s tracking.
Not much good news here. No surprise. Reducing and cleaning up emissions costs money.
I learned about this report from Ag Funder News: Danone and Nestlé hit back after new report accuses Big Food of ‘corporate greenwashing.’
According to the report, penned by nonprofits NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, “This focus on CDR [carbon dioxide removal] distracts from their lack of commitments to deep, structural emission reductions, especially regarding methane.
“While the draft GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Guidance recommends setting separate targets for emissions reductions and removals, the current SBTi FLAG guidance appears to allow companies to count removals toward their reduction targets. Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo seem to be taking this approach.”
It adds: “Companies are exploiting loopholes in voluntary standards like SBTi FLAG and the GHG Protocol, which allow them to blend removals with reductions in a single figure, masking a lack of real mitigation.”
I’m indebted to Errol Schweizer, Grocery Nerd, for pointing out in response to my post on we need more vegetables, that if we want more vegetables, somebody has to pick them. Raids by ICE on farmworkers are not helping this situation; they are wrong, morally and legally, and must stop.
Schweizer writes: RFK Betrays/ICE Terrorizes Food Workers.
The Border Patrol and Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) division continue to kidnap, persecute and traffic hard working, law-abiding essential food supply chain workers for no just cause.
Now is the time for the grocery industry, including retail and CPG executives, essential workers, brand founders and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) advocates to stand up against these flagrant violations of human rights, due process, civil liberties and just plain decency.
From the New York Times: Wilted Lettuce. Rotten Strawberries. Here’s What Happens When You Round Up Farmworkers.
Bottom line, it isn’t easy for farmers and ranchers to replace farmworkers if they’re deported or don’t show up. These positions require experience, endurance and specialized knowledge; as anyone who has worked on a farm will tell you, farm work is not unskilled labor.
From FoodPrint: How the current immigration crackdown is impacting food and farmworkers
Around 40 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. The numbers are similar in many other parts of the food system, especially meatpacking, where undocumented immigrants fill an estimated 23 percent of jobs. ..For the most part, farmers supported the Trump administration in the election, with many believing the president’s claims that he would spare farmworkers from promised mass deportations, focusing instead on “dangerous criminals”….[But] ICE agents began aggressively targeting worksites, visiting farms and packing sites in California and a meatpacking plant in Nebraska on June 10. Those raids generated an immediate flurry of complaints from farmers and the food industry.
From Civil Eats: ICE Raids Target Workers on Farms and in Food Production: A Running List
Immigration enforcement actions at workplaces are likely to increase as the agencies attempt to meet new White House goals of 3,000 arrests per day. We are keeping a record of those actions here.
Here is Civil Eats’ list for August, with contact information for Lisa Held, who is keeping track of all this.
August 7, 2025 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – ICE detains 16 workers during raids of two Mexican restaurants
August 8, 2025 – Woodburn, Oregon – ICE detains four immigrant farmworkers on their way to work at a blueberry farm
August 11, 2025 – Anchorage, Alaska – ICE officials arrest an asylum seeker outside sushi restaurant
August 14, 2025 – Kent, New York – ICE raids Lynn-Ette Farms—where United Farm Workers have been organizing— and detains seven workers
Want to send us a tip about immigration enforcement in your community? Email tracker@civileats.com or securely contact Lisa Held on Signal at @lisaelaineh.47. (Link to this post.)
Enjoy the Labor Day holiday, but then do what you can to make this stop.
