07/28/2025
🚨 Farmers are hurting in 2025. But what if that pain isn’t a bug in the system—it’s the plan? 🚨
Let’s take a look at what’s actually been happening to small and mid-size farms between 2024 and now:
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👷♂️ Labor Supply? Squeezed—on purpose.
The farms that grow, pick, and harvest America’s food rely heavily on the H‑2A guest worker program. But the current administration has done two things at once:
1. Increased labor costs through new wage reclassification rules—some small farms are seeing H‑2A wages jump by 30–40%.
2. Constricted access—cutting worker protections, ramping up immigration enforcement, and offering no real alternative.
The result? Not a stronger workforce. Just fewer workers, rising costs, and labor chaos.
No program expansion for year-round dairies. No surge of U.S. workers taking these jobs. Just fear, delays, and unaffordable payrolls.
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🏛 USDA? Hollowed out.
In 2025 alone, over 5,000 USDA jobs were cut. Conservation staff, field agents, and civil rights offices—gone or moved.
That’s not reform. That’s stripping the support that helps small producers stay afloat.
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📉 And the promised help? Delayed, empty, or redirected.
• Grants and climate funding cut or never delivered.
• Labor reform promised, but never passed.
• Outreach programs cut in rural areas, while corporate ag lobbies carry on full force.
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Meanwhile, who’s thriving?
💰 Corporate agriculture.
• Big farms can afford rising wages.
• They automate and vertically integrate.
• They gobble up land from smaller farms going under.
• And they have legal teams to navigate a broken immigration system.
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📊 By the numbers:
• Just 4% of farms now control almost 70% of U.S. farmland.
• Over 99% of U.S. livestock are raised in factory-style operations.
• The top 4 meatpackers control nearly 85% of the market.
This isn’t “saving the American farmer.”
This is clearing the field for the biggest players.
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🔍 So when farmers say they’re being crushed right now—it’s true. But maybe it’s not a policy failure.
Maybe it’s a deliberate consolidation strategy.
Because if you choke the labor, cut the grants, and gut the support, the little guy can’t survive.
And when they fall, guess who’s waiting to buy them out?
Next time someone says “we’re protecting American agriculture,” ask them:
👉 Which agriculture?
Because it sure as heck isn’t the family farm.
