80% of all farm welfare ends up in the hands of the large farming cooperatives. They use the money to undercut the smaller farmers or to buy them out. It's a travesty that should be corrected.
Without the subsidy the corn and bean racket bellies up the "family" farmer goes to work as a greeter and the corparation cuts out the middle man and farms millions of acres for greater "effiencies.
Small family farms will have a hard time surviving unless they are successful in filling a niche. For the American farmer to compete worldwide, there will continue to be consolidation to achieve greater productivity.
Which will be so important to America that it will become a synthesis of government and business otherwise known as Fascism,
With 50,000 farms producing about 50% of the total production, I'd say we're a long way from any oligopoly, like the legacy carriers, or anything that can remotely be construed as Fascism. You and I will be long gone before anything like that can occur so you might want to remove the tin foil in the meantime. You'll be much more comfortable.
I'll take the "hippie" Amish farmer and others who realize farming is a cultural based undertaking versus the industrial model anyday
Not if you want to feed 300 million domestically and compete in the international market.
I grew up on a farm in the Illinois I know the racket.
Then you should know better. No excuses.
You might want to rethink the pace in which consolidation is happening. As it has happened in my lifetime 42 years I have seen farms go from one section (640 acres) to no less than 2000 acres as large. With interest rate and subsidy changes these indebted land hogs would vanish faster than you think into larger better capitalized integrated corporations. If you think the Andreas/Dole connection is sleazy that is nothing compared to collective agribusiness that would happen once the family corporation is ingested by the multinationals.