The real problem here is not that the cost of food will go up. It will be the initial affect on a farmer who has to come up with a large chunk of money to pay his tax. I can’t imagine small farmers paying more in tax then they can hope to make in the next year in profit (since the price of product won’t rise until later, perhaps a year maybe two). That won’t happen. Instead they will sell off their animals for whatever a flooded market will pay.
The large farming corp will profit...the small farmers will go out of business.
The real cost of this will show up in a year or two down the road, when the number of livestock in the US is greatly diminished. The final affect will be massively higher food prices coupled with a less efficient farming system (small farmers replaced by corporations).
I think you’re right about losing farmers if an idea like this actually gets written into the rules.
I envisioned large farms — like the huge 5,000-head Horizon Organic factory type herds — on paper breaking their herds down into smaller units.
Two points bother me. How will it affect our farm? And, if we put all of our local US dairy farmers out of business, we’ll have to import milk. From China, for instance. And we know what high-quality producers THEY are.