America’s Broken Food System: Corporate Control, Failing Farms & Rising Costs
(00:00.142)
Fascinating a topic that we have been discussing here on the show for some time. It’s been some congressional hearings as of late, which again, I don’t know where that’s going to go probably nowhere, but it has to do with farming here in the United States. Our food supply. Some testimony yesterday. Today, 63 farmers will go out of business. Farmers are going broke at the same time as families can’t feed their kids.
Yet across agriculture and food sectors, dominant corporations are posting record profits. Holy crap. Gee, where did you hear that before? Farm actions. Joe Maxwell delivered a call to break up corporate monopolies in our food system. That was a roundtable discussion. Actually, it wasn’t a, well, kind of was. It was members of the Senate and the House that were there.
He said, when I began farming in 1980, the top four beef packers controlled about 36 % of the cattle. Today, it’s 85 % of the fat cattle. There were 56 fertilizer companies. Now there is three. They use supply chain disruptions to gouge the consumer and take advantage of the farmer. Again, we explain that to you here how that works.
And these farmers will be coming here and asking for another bailout from Congress, fourth time in just a little over a year.
Companies themselves acknowledge at the time and filings with the SEC that a large share of their pricing is not tied to their costs, but how much a farmer gets paid. The more bailout money you give the farmers, the more the input companies are going to charge. Again, yep, this just simple, we explain that here. That’s how monopoly power works. There’s another story here, you know.
(02:00.64)
US farms can shrink the lowest level in seven years 15,000 farms lost 2025. You’ll have some people come out on the other side and say, well, look at productivity and the value of the crops continue to go value the crops.
What are we growing exactly here? corn. Corn to make that stupid fricking ethanol to put in the cars or other types of commodities that you can trade and then sell overseas. I it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Our entire food delivery, our entire system of agriculture needs to be completely redone.
Going to be an enormously hard thing to do there is an enormous amount of wealth and very very powerful people that have very very powerful lobbyists Behind all of these organizations that want to keep the status quo I know I’ve said this recently here on the program to say it again I covered this cover this 20 years ago on the program. We were covering farm checks and The I remember there’s a story we figured out the amount of farm checks farm subsidy checks
that we’re going to Park Avenue addresses in Manhattan.
Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, on TV this past year, claimed to be a farmer. Come on, man. You own farmland that you rent. That’s the problem. You want to improve health, you want to improve food, guess what? The monopolies need to be broken up.
(03:51.673)
food delivery system we have here in the country is a disaster. We need to keep it local. We have to change the way we do things. There’s no need for us to be growing iceberg lettuce in the middle of the frickin desert, which has little to no nutritional value whatsoever, diverting all sorts of water from the Colorado River so we can ship it to every corner of this country. Dumb.
Freaking dumb, but that’s that’s what we do Can’t we we always think we’re so star-spangled awesome Here in this cut drives me nuts the lack of humility and you know the idea that we cannot learn anything from anyone else because we’re just so much better than Everybody else out there. We might want to Look around the globe at some of these countries that are you know, people are held a lot healthier than we are
They’re not as rich as we are via GDP per capita, but they’re a hell of a lot healthier than we are. Gee, I wonder why that is. Might have something to do with the food. I’ve been talking about this before here on the program. You know what country in the world? Country in the world’s got the highest level of smoking. It’s Japan. Japan. How is it that they manage to outlive us?
has a lot to do what they eat, how they eat, a myriad of other things. Need a complete reset. Do I think that there’s hell and high water chance of that happening at this point in time? No. No, but I guess, you know, maybe the more people learn about it, more people demand it, maybe, maybe, God willing. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
