Protecting small farmers during the period of radical transformation

Brock Rollins, Trump’s candidate for the Minister of Agriculture, is undergoing US agricultural lands to a radical transformation.

High land prices and an increase in institutional investment in agricultural lands makes it difficult for small farmers to compete. These trends destroy rural societies and lead to migration of generations of agriculture with high food prices and the growth of demand for local products.

High risks. It is expected that the elderly agricultural population will exceed 400 million acres of land in the next decade with the retirement of farmers. Everyone who comes to control this land will determine the next chapter of American agriculture and food production. The restrictions imposed on institutional investment in agricultural lands, societal initiatives such as land funds, government agricultural credits and support plans should remain to remain small farmers as a focus of American agriculture.

The 2008 financial crisis broke the urban and suburban areas; More than a million people have lost their homes by holding the mortgage, and home construction has not yet recovered. Since then, the founding investors have become major housing owners, urban lands and valuable suburbs, a trend of acceleration during the epidemic.

Rural areas were similarly difficult, despite their weakest position. By the middle of the century between mid to the late twenty, small and self -self -intellectual farmers began to face tremendous pressure on their lands from increasing agricultural blocs and growing globalized markets. The non -balance support scheme arose around a few crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat that can be more profitable when cultivating on a large scale.

However, the organizational capacity of the Ministry of Agriculture and a group of other policies that prefer large agriculture in industries such as dairy and meat treatment.

The 2008 financial crisis and the epidemic were small farmers in new ways. The value of the agricultural lands owned by investment groups has grown nearly 10 times since 2008, and three times during the past three years. This has moved along with the cultivated real estate values, which increased by almost 40 percent over the past decade. High inflation and stock market fluctuations increase the attractiveness of agricultural land for investors, because farm prices follow inflation closely and rarely decrease.

Young farmers are increasingly anxious about the estimation of agricultural lands. Retirement and university pension funds are gaining large portfolios from land, outstanding family farmers and rural communities cavity. Meanwhile, billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos have hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land, and joins the wealthy landowners such as the Emerson, Ted Turner and John Malon family. Many farmers are afraid that this trend will continue with the retirement of the agricultural population and with increased land values ​​with climate change.

Long trends towards the base of smaller agricultural lands and increasing the sizes of agriculture makes these changes particularly sharp. The agricultural land area decides at a rate of 35 million acres per contract due to development pressures. The average size of the farm has doubled more than twice since 1950 to more than 460 acres, for the benefit of large farms. Today, 8 percent of farms own 40 percent of agricultural land.

Minor farmers face a unique challenge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately 14 percent of American farmers were black. But nearly a century of discrimination and a lack of access to the US Department of Agriculture’s credits and support, minorities own only 2 percent of agricultural lands today, while 60 percent of farm workers are colored people. Trump’s immigration policies pose a major threat to these farms workers, most of whom are born abroad and many of them lack official work license.

It is important for small, viable farms to remain important for American functions, food security and the ability of rural societies to prosper. One of the emerging solutions is the establishment of community land funds, which take land from the market and place them under the control of society. Land funds are increasingly widespread, and they can protect and promote young farmers, but they need more investment to succeed on a large scale.

Federal governments and state governments play an important role in ensuring access to credits and subsidies for a wide range of crops. Only last summer, the federal government began distributing payments to thousands of farmers who have suffered from government supported discrimination from the government in agricultural aid programs.

It is also necessary to reduce institutional investment in agricultural lands. Some states already have investment restrictions, and there have been initiatives in Congress to restrict agricultural land purchases by institutional investors.

Small farmers in all fields want an equal stadium under the next Minister of Agriculture, and if you give the opportunity it will be a continuous force in American agriculture.

Michael AlbertosHe is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “The Power of the Earth: Who has, who does not, and how this determines the fate of societies.”