Another part of the puzzle is Chinese buying farmland. There was a bit of a stink about Chinese companies buying US farmland recently but that’s missing the point. Farmland in the US is expensive and the Chinese aren’t going to be major players here. Where they are becoming major players is in subsaharan Africa which has plenty of arable land, but no capital, infrastructure, or know-how to make use of it. The Chinese have a generational outlook on this and are buying up land and infrastructure elsewhere. They seem to be determined not to starve.
Contrast that with the US where a lot of our farmers are elderly and not being replaced. And those remaining farmers sure aren’t branching out to new areas outside the US.
How do you say "Lebensraum" in Mandarin?
The real farming in the US isn’t done by good ol’ boys in overalls anymore. They are industrialized enterprises with highly qualified management teams on top of the operations, and, well, in my experience anyway, illegals doing the grunt work. That’s what I saw in the Florida panhandle dairy farms, anyway, back when I worked on a couple of them.