America’s Farming Crisis: Aging Farmers, Rising Bankruptcies, Broken Food System
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In my opinion, great baseball movie, The Natural. Manager of the baseball team, Pop Fisher, Wilfred Brinley, and he’s upset. He’s got a horrible Major League baseball team they’re doing horribly, and he’s talking to his assistant coach. like, I should have been a farmer, Red. I should, my mother told me I should have been a farmer. Well, nobody’s saying that anymore. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal today talking about
farming and how farmers are aging and their kids want no part of the family business. 2025 let’s go through some number 315 farms filed for bankruptcy up 46 % from 2024. There are more farmers 75 years and older than under the age of 35. Tough choices.
tough prospects, bailouts, bailouts, farmers already rely on government bailouts 2024 10 billion in bailout funds 21 billion in natural disaster relief. December Trump pledged $12 billion in aid I don’t know if that money has gone out the door yet. What happened?
what happened and in this story that talked about a family from Illinois farming family has been there since their farm has been there since the 1830s and again making soybeans, usually soybeans and corn. I’ve talked about this here on the program and the fact that commodities, food commodities and they’re tradable. They’re tradable, they’re assets.
We all saw the movie Trading Places there. Remember frozen concentrated orange juice? Again, all of these things have turned into massive crops. We do not have really the farm to table experience that other countries have. We’ve been doing it wrong for a period of time and it’s not getting any better. What we could do to change this? And again, I’ve gone off on certain
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overzealous, anti trust Lena con and some of the things that she was doing. But I harken back to the first Trump administration and the original Republican platform from at point in time, actually, one of the things that they said that they were going to do back in 2016 was to actually go after the big banks and breaking up the big financial institutions. And I was thrilled about that. That’s something I’ve been calling for.
some time. Do a little homework on this yourself. I want you to just take a look at the makeup and the corporations that basically handle all of our food here in the United States. It’s a not a very big club and a lot of power between these various different organizations. recently had a conversation with an estate attorney
she’s from a farm, nonetheless, in Illinois. And was talking about, you know, her upbringing there. And, you know, she grew up on a farm. And she’s like, Yeah, all the farms there, they’re gone. They’re gone. I said, What happened? Well, they turned into housing. tracks, they were they were sold off, changed the zoning and sold for housing. farmland is, it’s valuable.
It’s valuable. One of the reasons why it’s valuable is for that reason. Someone will step in and they’ll say, okay, you have private equity types, people, buy it up, then they lease the land to farmers and oftentimes cutting deals based upon how much the commodities are priced at, how much money the farmer is making, but it’s kind of a wait and see type of a situation. What are they holding out for?
Real estate development.
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We talk about on-shoring things. president talks about on-shoring all sorts of critical industry, talks about steel and we’re making more steel in the United States. We have to bring businesses home. I would think that food security would be of the utmost importance. And let’s, again, I’ve talked about this before. Let’s not fool ourselves.
and to thinking that the quality here in the United States is like it is anywhere else in entire world. It’s not. It’s not. you know, people love yelling at me about this. I’m sorry. OK, travel. Travel, leave the country, take a look at the ingredients and you know what? In food I don’t eat, I don’t eat potato chips, but just look, OK, take a look at a package of potato chips here in the United States.
in the laundry laundry list of ingredients are there, then go pick up a bag of potato chips in Spain, or Italy or Greece or anywhere else where it’s three things, four things, that’s it. Take a look at the quality of produce that you’re getting and the prices which are much, less than we have here. We here in the United States,
In certain areas of our economy, we’ve become, isn’t it amazing, enormously productive? Enormously productive when it comes to supply chains and a myriad of different things. Why does that not filter down when it comes to food? Why do we have multiple layers of middlemen and various different people wetting their beak along the way before that food actually makes it?
to our table, makes it to the grocery store and you take a look at, you’re checking out and you’re like, I just spent what?
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That’s our system. And if we need to break something up, we need to start over, we need to bring down, you want to make the American people happy? You blow up the entire food delivery system here in the United States, change the way we are doing things. You drive food costs down, that’s going to go down. Restaurant costs are going to go down. You don’t think people are going to be smiling from ear to ear?
They will, they will. But again, these are very, very powerful entities. Very powerful entities. And again, you can go take a look and do a little homework on the history of Big Ag and Big Food and the additives that were put in and the tobacco companies after they.
got themselves in trouble with their product, deciding to buy food because, we can make that addictive too. There’s a myriad of different things. You start delving into, you go into a bit of a black hole. What we do know is prices at the grocery store continue to rise. Now again, Robert F. Kenny Jr.’ efforts to make our food healthier, remove things, being more transparent, changing the food, that’s all well and good.
That’s all well and good, but you know, what we do need is to change our entire system, the delivery system, and how we are getting food on to people’s tables. And again, this will benefit the farmers.
This will benefit the farmers. This will make it a more attractive career. And the taxpayers, interestingly enough, we have to constantly spend billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to bail out this industry. All these food companies, they’re profitable. Again, you do the math on this. How does this make any sense? Watchdogonwallstreet.com.
