This is soul-stirring stuff. Alas, I don't understand the insurance system you are discussing. I do know these things are fiendishly complicated, but if you could explain it, it would help many of us outside farm country.
Thirding this: I'm interested, but I'm a city person who hasn't a clue why it would matter if a different field on the graph is producing well each year. Is the point that the low-producing ones are deliberately sabotaged? How does that benefit the person cooking the books?
Great article here. I feel you - it pains me to watch corporations like Wal-Mart and Dollar General absolutely gut small towns in my area. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts the infamous secretary of ag, Earl Butz and his "get big or get out" mantra.
This plain-spoken elegy for the family farmer creates a certain hollowness in the gut that reminds me of the final days of my student teaching, when I realized that the profession of “teacher”- I come from a long line of teachers on my father’s side; many of them from farming communities in the midwest and the Colorado plains - had been sliced, diced, quantized, and reshaped into a packaged “product” with a distribution chain and business model. It was all about “classroom management” and test scores. And, as Adam points out, it is in this model that cheating flourishes not only as “this one neat trick", but a moral imperative for survival, and, ultimately, the bludgeon used by the wealthy and powerful to take, take, take whatever they want, from whomever they want. Farming, education … this is happening everywhere. I don’t know that this machine can be stopped, but at least we can bear witness to the destructive swath it has cut through our fields. There is some cold comfort in knowing that there are still those who see and speak the plain and honest truth of simply being human even in a deafening maelstrom of the impersonal and the industrial.
It's the core flaws in the bigger is better concept. I got an MBA in the late 80s. The focus was shifting from what the the corp did for the owners and community to how did the managers divert the profits into personal pockets. You destroy the small biz, you destroy the community. The Amish understood. It wasn't the electricity was bad, it was the effect the electricity had on the bonds of community......
Similar to here in the UK. Family farms lost to corporations and hedge farms, generations of hard work left derelict so as they can claim "environmental" subsidies. One day perhaps sooner than they realise there won't be cheap food to import from the other side of the globe. I admire the young farmers brave enough to start, but fear for them.
Oh man, Adam! Whew. That was a difficult and necessary read!
Thank you for spilling your guts so that a few people can scratch the surface of what it's like to watch and feel as farming sinks into the quicksand.
This-- I feel this every day:
"We have to be loud enough to wake up the rest of this machine before it buries another generation's dreams.
This isn't about writing letters to sold-out congressmen or sharing sanitized social media posts.
This is about speaking truth raw as fresh-cut silage: In coffee shops where farmers trade market gossip and survival strategies. In high school guidance offices where another farm kid gets told to "look at other options." In bank lobbies, where more dreams get buried in paperwork than dirt.
Tell it like it burns in your gut.
Tell it like the empty yard where dreams go to die.
Tell it like you're running out of time—because I shit you not, we are.
If we don't start making noise now, there won't be anyone left to tell these stories except the corporate chroniclers who never got dirt under their nails or grief under their skin."
I’m sorry but I don’t get the scam. It isn’t well spelled out for the layperson. Lots of heartfelt and good writing but the point seems lost or buried somewhere in the hurt.
Don’t get me wrong I think you are trying to convey a truth but in my mind you need to articulate the details and mechanics of it. Especially if you want your message to spread wider.
Why do they spread these yield problems around. I assume they are made up. Is this problems with land rentals or other arrangements as well. I assume it ends with the landowner having to sell out?
I appreciate you taking the time to wrestle with this piece.
You’re right—there’s a lot of hurt here, and maybe it clouds the clarity you’re looking for. But sometimes the hurt is the point. Like storm damage, it reveals more about the system’s weakness than any technical report ever could.
Think of it this way—when you pass an abandoned farmhouse, do you need to know the exact sequence of bank notes and broken promises that led to its emptiness to feel its weight?
When you drive through a dying town, past dark storefronts and shuttered implement dealers, does understanding the specific financial mechanics make that loss feel any less real?
The “scam” isn’t hidden in spreadsheets or yield data. It’s written in every empty machine shed, every foreclosed dream, every young man like my cousin who saw the writing on the walls before the rest of us could admit it.
The mechanics?
They’re just different ways of spelling goodbye in corporate letterhead.
I’m not here to draft policy or untangle crop insurance regulations. I’m here to show what it feels like when a way of life bleeds out through paperwork. When communities die not from one fatal blow but from a thousand precise, legal cuts—a system working exactly as designed.
Because here’s the truth that keeps me up at night: understanding how the machine works doesn’t matter much when you’re the one being ground in its gears.
That said, if you want to dig into the mechanics, I’m open to that conversation too. Sometimes truth needs both roots and wings to grow.
I understand what you are trying to communicate. For myself I need to understand what is going on and why it is happening. Same as if a house catches fire. Is it arson or a frayed electrical cord. A fix requires some forensics. It also helps mobilize not just sympathy but change.
To say farm houses and towns are emptying is one thing. To point to corporate malfeasance is another. This has been going on a long time. What I sense is there is some kabal of the powerful exploiting their power.
The farmhouse my mother grew up in in Iowa is no longer there. That was because her brother had it torn down as they couldn’t afford upkeep and find tenants. That farm eventually got sold when he needed money to take care of his wife. It was sold to a neighbor farmer known by the family. Looks like a tragedy but it was not. Farms do consolidate as it is a business of scale.
My dad has a half interest in the 500 acre farm he inherited. I look after his affairs now. We do not rent the land out but hire a farmer and farm manager. We capitalize the costs and profit depending on the market prices for corn and soy beans. The farmer and manager do a good job keeping it yielding well. My dad earns a small steady income. When I met our farm manager a number of years ago he explained the different business models and I recall some mention of companies buying up land rental contracts and paying over the odds rents. There was some plan under way to control enough land and market access to force lower rents and perhaps force the sales of the land. I don’t recall the details now.
I think if you could combine a story of how this tragedy happens with the emotion of lost towns, homes and lives it would be more compelling to read. But perhaps that is just me. Your passion is obvious and well expressed.
I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective and experience.
Your insights about needing both the emotional truth and the mechanical understanding are invaluable. I’m working on a book that explores both sides of this story: the human cost and the system that extracts it.
Your feedback is helping me better understand how to bridge that gap.
This makes me think of an idea or rather a criticism that’s been swirling around my mind. That is that the FFA programs at high schools are propaganda programs in which kids are told they are going to work in “ag” or “farming” but really they will end up going to community college or a state U where they get an ag degree and go work for some AG giant like Cargill or Dow. Might work for Farm Bureau or Farm credit. They will get to wear boots and jeans to work and drive a nice truck. They will believe they are carrying on the legacy of American farming but really they are just cogs in the equity firm machine. I don’t want to diminish the hard work done by FFA teachers and nice community members. I also don’t want to cheapen the real skills kids can learn in FFA. It’s just an observation I’ve made over 30 years of living and working in a farming region.
Failure becomes a habit, because people steeped in 2 centuries of being told the idea is to keep making bigger and bigger profits internalize the message it's their fault when it doesn't happen. Coat that with the more recent message that working together as a community is a further sign of weakness, and it's easy for the vultures to claim what's left.
Boom years cause more failed farms than bust years. In boom years all the advice from the bankers and implement dealers and chemical dealers and the warehouse managers is “we’ll carry your debt! Buy more, buy new, buy big!” Problem is boom always ends in bust. Notes are called, equipment is repossessed, and an occasional unplanned funeral is attended. The winners? The ones who didn’t heed the call to buy more, buy big… and the ones too big to fail. And today? Fewer farms, fewer farmers and fewer farm families… and the one to big to fail, the one the bankers and implement companies, and the chemical companies have too much tied up in. The one farm where debt is written off, where another chance is given, and who will buy land and acquire leases, from other farmers who can’t compete, to keep going. Yet the locals still wave, anyway the ones who remain, as the too big to fail trucks bypass the local elevators for private elevators. Where they bypass the towns of those they rent from, hauling what money is generated to their town, their bank and their pocket. And the government checks roll in.
So true. Big Ag writes the Farm Bill to subsidize themselves and politicians throw in the EBT card to pacify all the little people. Farm Bureau doesn't represent small family farmers and neither does the USDA. Read the regulations at both State & Federal levels. All the rules are designed to make it harder for small family operations to compete or even get their livestock products processed locally and easier for the operations with big money to skirt the rules.
So sad and so true. You are right - and they way you get non-farmers in board is to talk about the results (Ie GMO food with less nutrition, continue increase in cost of fresh food, etc) as they cannot comprehend what’s going on at the farm level - Tucker had this Dr Hyman on a few months back - he does address somewhat the chokehold that the BIG Ag system etc has on farmers - In case you are interested :
I admire you for documenting this so personally. This is a huge story and your work will help give meaning to the families and communities eaten by subsidized Big Ag. Get em💛
I'm not a farmer, but I live in a farming county in upstate New York. The thing you wrote really well about was the silence. At times, it is luxurious. At other times, it is a gut-punch.
I ran for Congress in November and hope to run again when the Governor calls a Special Election. The farmers are a difficult group to speak with. They don't trust easily. They have been burned by non-farmers, especially candidates for elected office.
In some pockets you are seeing "gentlemen" (or women) farmers move in to give it a go. We also have a significant presence of Amish families. But big ag lurks. How sad it is to see people who are employed by big ag who can't earn enough to feed their families.
Thanks for writing. I look forward to your next column.
This is soul-stirring stuff. Alas, I don't understand the insurance system you are discussing. I do know these things are fiendishly complicated, but if you could explain it, it would help many of us outside farm country.
Thirding this: I'm interested, but I'm a city person who hasn't a clue why it would matter if a different field on the graph is producing well each year. Is the point that the low-producing ones are deliberately sabotaged? How does that benefit the person cooking the books?
Same yes explain in more detail from start to finish so us outside farming but aligned with your message can get it.
Great article here. I feel you - it pains me to watch corporations like Wal-Mart and Dollar General absolutely gut small towns in my area. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts the infamous secretary of ag, Earl Butz and his "get big or get out" mantra.
Damned fine writing, Adam.
This plain-spoken elegy for the family farmer creates a certain hollowness in the gut that reminds me of the final days of my student teaching, when I realized that the profession of “teacher”- I come from a long line of teachers on my father’s side; many of them from farming communities in the midwest and the Colorado plains - had been sliced, diced, quantized, and reshaped into a packaged “product” with a distribution chain and business model. It was all about “classroom management” and test scores. And, as Adam points out, it is in this model that cheating flourishes not only as “this one neat trick", but a moral imperative for survival, and, ultimately, the bludgeon used by the wealthy and powerful to take, take, take whatever they want, from whomever they want. Farming, education … this is happening everywhere. I don’t know that this machine can be stopped, but at least we can bear witness to the destructive swath it has cut through our fields. There is some cold comfort in knowing that there are still those who see and speak the plain and honest truth of simply being human even in a deafening maelstrom of the impersonal and the industrial.
It's the core flaws in the bigger is better concept. I got an MBA in the late 80s. The focus was shifting from what the the corp did for the owners and community to how did the managers divert the profits into personal pockets. You destroy the small biz, you destroy the community. The Amish understood. It wasn't the electricity was bad, it was the effect the electricity had on the bonds of community......
Similar to here in the UK. Family farms lost to corporations and hedge farms, generations of hard work left derelict so as they can claim "environmental" subsidies. One day perhaps sooner than they realise there won't be cheap food to import from the other side of the globe. I admire the young farmers brave enough to start, but fear for them.
Oh man, Adam! Whew. That was a difficult and necessary read!
Thank you for spilling your guts so that a few people can scratch the surface of what it's like to watch and feel as farming sinks into the quicksand.
This-- I feel this every day:
"We have to be loud enough to wake up the rest of this machine before it buries another generation's dreams.
This isn't about writing letters to sold-out congressmen or sharing sanitized social media posts.
This is about speaking truth raw as fresh-cut silage: In coffee shops where farmers trade market gossip and survival strategies. In high school guidance offices where another farm kid gets told to "look at other options." In bank lobbies, where more dreams get buried in paperwork than dirt.
Tell it like it burns in your gut.
Tell it like the empty yard where dreams go to die.
Tell it like you're running out of time—because I shit you not, we are.
If we don't start making noise now, there won't be anyone left to tell these stories except the corporate chroniclers who never got dirt under their nails or grief under their skin."
I’m sorry but I don’t get the scam. It isn’t well spelled out for the layperson. Lots of heartfelt and good writing but the point seems lost or buried somewhere in the hurt.
Don’t get me wrong I think you are trying to convey a truth but in my mind you need to articulate the details and mechanics of it. Especially if you want your message to spread wider.
Why do they spread these yield problems around. I assume they are made up. Is this problems with land rentals or other arrangements as well. I assume it ends with the landowner having to sell out?
Hey Doug,
I appreciate you taking the time to wrestle with this piece.
You’re right—there’s a lot of hurt here, and maybe it clouds the clarity you’re looking for. But sometimes the hurt is the point. Like storm damage, it reveals more about the system’s weakness than any technical report ever could.
Think of it this way—when you pass an abandoned farmhouse, do you need to know the exact sequence of bank notes and broken promises that led to its emptiness to feel its weight?
When you drive through a dying town, past dark storefronts and shuttered implement dealers, does understanding the specific financial mechanics make that loss feel any less real?
The “scam” isn’t hidden in spreadsheets or yield data. It’s written in every empty machine shed, every foreclosed dream, every young man like my cousin who saw the writing on the walls before the rest of us could admit it.
The mechanics?
They’re just different ways of spelling goodbye in corporate letterhead.
I’m not here to draft policy or untangle crop insurance regulations. I’m here to show what it feels like when a way of life bleeds out through paperwork. When communities die not from one fatal blow but from a thousand precise, legal cuts—a system working exactly as designed.
Because here’s the truth that keeps me up at night: understanding how the machine works doesn’t matter much when you’re the one being ground in its gears.
That said, if you want to dig into the mechanics, I’m open to that conversation too. Sometimes truth needs both roots and wings to grow.
Hi Adam,
I understand what you are trying to communicate. For myself I need to understand what is going on and why it is happening. Same as if a house catches fire. Is it arson or a frayed electrical cord. A fix requires some forensics. It also helps mobilize not just sympathy but change.
To say farm houses and towns are emptying is one thing. To point to corporate malfeasance is another. This has been going on a long time. What I sense is there is some kabal of the powerful exploiting their power.
The farmhouse my mother grew up in in Iowa is no longer there. That was because her brother had it torn down as they couldn’t afford upkeep and find tenants. That farm eventually got sold when he needed money to take care of his wife. It was sold to a neighbor farmer known by the family. Looks like a tragedy but it was not. Farms do consolidate as it is a business of scale.
My dad has a half interest in the 500 acre farm he inherited. I look after his affairs now. We do not rent the land out but hire a farmer and farm manager. We capitalize the costs and profit depending on the market prices for corn and soy beans. The farmer and manager do a good job keeping it yielding well. My dad earns a small steady income. When I met our farm manager a number of years ago he explained the different business models and I recall some mention of companies buying up land rental contracts and paying over the odds rents. There was some plan under way to control enough land and market access to force lower rents and perhaps force the sales of the land. I don’t recall the details now.
I think if you could combine a story of how this tragedy happens with the emotion of lost towns, homes and lives it would be more compelling to read. But perhaps that is just me. Your passion is obvious and well expressed.
Happy to discuss more if you like.
Doug, thank you.
I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective and experience.
Your insights about needing both the emotional truth and the mechanical understanding are invaluable. I’m working on a book that explores both sides of this story: the human cost and the system that extracts it.
Your feedback is helping me better understand how to bridge that gap.
I’m grateful for that. 🌱
You are welcome Adam. Let me know if I can help.
This makes me think of an idea or rather a criticism that’s been swirling around my mind. That is that the FFA programs at high schools are propaganda programs in which kids are told they are going to work in “ag” or “farming” but really they will end up going to community college or a state U where they get an ag degree and go work for some AG giant like Cargill or Dow. Might work for Farm Bureau or Farm credit. They will get to wear boots and jeans to work and drive a nice truck. They will believe they are carrying on the legacy of American farming but really they are just cogs in the equity firm machine. I don’t want to diminish the hard work done by FFA teachers and nice community members. I also don’t want to cheapen the real skills kids can learn in FFA. It’s just an observation I’ve made over 30 years of living and working in a farming region.
Failure becomes a habit, because people steeped in 2 centuries of being told the idea is to keep making bigger and bigger profits internalize the message it's their fault when it doesn't happen. Coat that with the more recent message that working together as a community is a further sign of weakness, and it's easy for the vultures to claim what's left.
Boom years cause more failed farms than bust years. In boom years all the advice from the bankers and implement dealers and chemical dealers and the warehouse managers is “we’ll carry your debt! Buy more, buy new, buy big!” Problem is boom always ends in bust. Notes are called, equipment is repossessed, and an occasional unplanned funeral is attended. The winners? The ones who didn’t heed the call to buy more, buy big… and the ones too big to fail. And today? Fewer farms, fewer farmers and fewer farm families… and the one to big to fail, the one the bankers and implement companies, and the chemical companies have too much tied up in. The one farm where debt is written off, where another chance is given, and who will buy land and acquire leases, from other farmers who can’t compete, to keep going. Yet the locals still wave, anyway the ones who remain, as the too big to fail trucks bypass the local elevators for private elevators. Where they bypass the towns of those they rent from, hauling what money is generated to their town, their bank and their pocket. And the government checks roll in.
So true. Big Ag writes the Farm Bill to subsidize themselves and politicians throw in the EBT card to pacify all the little people. Farm Bureau doesn't represent small family farmers and neither does the USDA. Read the regulations at both State & Federal levels. All the rules are designed to make it harder for small family operations to compete or even get their livestock products processed locally and easier for the operations with big money to skirt the rules.
So sad and so true. You are right - and they way you get non-farmers in board is to talk about the results (Ie GMO food with less nutrition, continue increase in cost of fresh food, etc) as they cannot comprehend what’s going on at the farm level - Tucker had this Dr Hyman on a few months back - he does address somewhat the chokehold that the BIG Ag system etc has on farmers - In case you are interested :
https://rumble.com/v5tp50b-dr.-mark-hyman-everything-youre-eating-is-toxic-and-big-pharma-likes-it-tha.html
They Got Us Good Over Here In Coal Country
Oh what an article more please
I admire you for documenting this so personally. This is a huge story and your work will help give meaning to the families and communities eaten by subsidized Big Ag. Get em💛
I'm not a farmer, but I live in a farming county in upstate New York. The thing you wrote really well about was the silence. At times, it is luxurious. At other times, it is a gut-punch.
I ran for Congress in November and hope to run again when the Governor calls a Special Election. The farmers are a difficult group to speak with. They don't trust easily. They have been burned by non-farmers, especially candidates for elected office.
In some pockets you are seeing "gentlemen" (or women) farmers move in to give it a go. We also have a significant presence of Amish families. But big ag lurks. How sad it is to see people who are employed by big ag who can't earn enough to feed their families.
Thanks for writing. I look forward to your next column.