You may or may not agree with what RFK Jnr has to say about the demise of the family farm in America, in his case looking at just one type of farming, pigs, or “hogs” as they say in America. I’ve included the transcript below the video (3m long) in case the link doesn’t work or you (like me) can’t stand RFK’Jnr’s voice.

Shirley Troubadour asked a question about why Gates and China are being allowed to buy up all the farmland in our country and I’m going to tell you something that I had an experience with.

I spent many years, about 20 years, sueing the factory farms, the big hog farms and big chicken producers like Tyson and Beau Pilgrim and Frank Purdue and Smithfield, the biggest Pork producer.

Smithfield came to the state of North Carolina. They built a slaughterhouse that could process 30 000 pigs a day, and then they had a partner named Wendell Murphy who was in the state senate, and he passed 28 laws in the North Carolina State Senate making it illegal to sue a factory farm.

He left and went into partnership with Smithfield and created a way to raise pigs. Instead of raising them on farms, to raise them in warehouses called Murphy 1100s. They dropped the price of pork from sixty cents a pound to two cents a pound. It put out of business all 28,000 independent hog farmers in the state of North Carolina and it replaced them with 2,200 factories, all of them either owned by Smithfield or contracted to Smithfield.

The only farmers who could stay in business were farmers who signed that contract with Smithfield to mortgage their homes, to put those big hog sheds, the Murphy 1100s, on their property, and then they lose all control. They become serfs on their own land. Smithfield dictates all their farming practices; it gives them the food; it delivers the piglets; picks up the grown animals; and brings them to slaughter.

They put out of business 28,000 farmers and control now 80 percent of the hog production in North Carolina. Because they dropped the price in North Carolina, Iowa had to adopt the same system, had to cave in to Smithfield. They ended up taking control of 80% of the hog production in our country.

Then they sold themselves to China, so now China owns all that hog production in America and it controls our landscapes.

And that’s the end of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds, each one owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our system of government.

And that’s why all of this industrial agriculture not only gives us substandard food but they’re also taking control of our landscapes, and that is a huge threat to American democracy.

BTW, the first graph above is from a post I did a couple of years ago, All-corporate farming is the answer?, where I explored an aspect that RFK Jnr naturally ignores, the fact that farming subsidies designed to supposedly help small farmers, the family farm, actually ended up destroying them because large farms could more easily harvest the subsidies.

Nevertheless, basic old economics and technology is the fundamental driver of this change from family to factory farming, even if subsidies had not existed. What consumer families who buy pork and bacon can ignore such a huge reduction in cost? All this is the reason for the next graph showing the history of how much work it takes to buy a basket of groceries, which is surely a good thing.

Even here in NZ, with no farming subsidies, I’ve seen the same forces at work as sheep farms die out, relying solely on meat not wool (despite the so-called “back to nature” Green bullshit), and dairy farms continue to consolidate and grow ever larger:

There was one other thing I found that threw me. A few weeks ago we were planting maize on a 50Ha block. It was a so-called “run-off”; 50Ha purchased by a large dairy operation owned by a rich family with perhaps 2000 cows. We were parked near the old cow shed, which had clearly been the centre of that 50Ha dairy farm, and during a break I took a look at it.

It was like the Mary Celeste. Everything was there intact; rusted equipment, rusted tools on the floor, even the smocks worn in the pit, all covered in birdshit. A tractor and more in similar shape. Whoever owned this place did not sell willingly. I can only imagine that the bank told them that a deal had been made and they just walked off, owing no debt to cleaning up.

We planted the 50Ha in maize as stock food input for the new high capacity, rotary-shed owners and departed late at night. I knew I had seen not just the present but the future of New Zealand farming and it felt melancholy.

Probably the same melancholy that RFK Jnr feels about American family farms. I suppose an argument could be made against the Chinese ownership aspect, given that it means control of American farm land by the Chinese Communist Party. But what we see here is the reality of economics, not ideology.

Short of a revolution it cannot be reversed; even if the Chinese were forced to sell up the buyer would have to be a corporation of some sort, rather like what would happen here if the government sold off all the dairy farms owned by Landcorp. RFK Jnr could also easily be talking about the gigantic cattle farms in the US. He’s also apparently not aware that Jefferson’s vision of American democracy was already dead by the 1820’s.