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Family Farmer Advocates Outline Farm Bill Priorities

This year Congress is set to renew America’s primary vehicle for agriculture policy, the Farm Bill. This massive legislative package passed roughly every five years encompasses federal nutrition benefits (think SNAP), crop price supports, agriculture conservation initiatives, farm loan programs, and much more. As debate begins, many family farm advocates have recently [[link removed]] descended [[link removed]] upon Washington to promote policies that challenge corporate consolidation and support more sustainable and regional food systems. Here’s a summary of the anti-monopoly bills and policy proposals to watch over the next few months.

Mega-Merger Prohibitions and Moratoriums

Given high levels of corporate consolidation along every link in the food supply chain, advocates are calling on Congress to simply ban or pause future Big Ag mergers. Organizations including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition [[link removed]] (NSAC), Farm Action [[link removed]], and the Land Stewardship Project [[link removed]] have called for a ban on the largest agribusiness mergers, similar to the ban laid out in Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act [[link removed]]. These organizations also support a more moderate moratorium on large food business mergers until Congress passes broader antitrust reform, as proposed by Senators Cory Booker, Jon Tester, Jeff Merkley, and Warren in the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act [[link removed]]. This bill, modeled after similar legislation introduced 20 years ago by the late Senator Paul Wellstone, would establish a commission to study consolidation in agriculture and suggest policy recommendations to improve merger and antitrust enforcement in the food sector. These proposals would also start studies to build the case for breaking up dominant agribusinesses.

Curbing and Investigating Meatpacker Manipulation

Pandemic meat supply-chain disruptions and price-fixing scandals have prompted calls to address monopolization in the meat industry. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently in the process of updating the Packers and Stockyards Act (P&S Act), the main law banning unfair methods of competition, deception, and abusive tactics by meatpackers. Some legislative proposals, primarily included in Senator Booker’s Farm System Reform [[link removed]] and Protecting America’s Meatpacking Workers [[link removed]] Acts, would have Congress update the P&S Act directly, but while USDA works through their rulemakings, advocates mostly want Congress not to stall this process. When the Obama administration proposed [[link removed]] similar Packers and Stockyards rules that would ban tournament payment systems used by poultry companies and improve farmers’ ability to bring P&S Act claims, Congress passed appropriations riders to prevent USDA from implementing the rules. Advocates hope Congress doesn’t repeat history this time around.

Beyond updating the P&S Act, Congress could boost its enforcement by including Senators Tester, Mike Rounds, and Chuck Grassley’s recently reintroduced [[link removed]] Meat Packing Special Investigator Act [[link removed]] in the Farm Bill. The proposal would create a new office and special investigator position with subpoena power within USDA’s Packers and Stockyards Division to investigate Packers and Stockyards violations.

Country of Origin Labeling and Checkoff Reform

This Farm Bill could finally settle a decade-long debate over something that seems quite simple: country of origin labels on meat. A coalition of 50 organizations [[link removed]] including R-CALF, National Farmers Union, and the National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association recently urged Congress to pass the American Beef Labeling Act [[link removed]], which would mandate country of origin labels (COOL) on beef. As it stands, beef and pork raised and processed abroad can carry a “product of the U.S.A” label so long as it passes through a U.S. facility. This allows multinational meatpackers to market meat from their global networks as domestic products and unfairly compete with U.S. farmers. R-CALF and supporters want to close this loophole and disclose if animals were born, raised, and processed abroad. Congress required mandatory COOL in the 2008 Farm Bills, only to repeal it in 2015 after pressure from the World Trade Organization. Advocates hope this is the year that Congress mandates a WTO-compliant solution and institutes COOL for good.

One of the biggest opponents [[link removed]] of country of origin labeling has been the National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA), a lobbying group that gets some funding from a federal tax on cattle producers [[link removed]]. Farmers of certain products, including beef, dairy, pork, and various fruits and vegetables, pay fees on their sales to fund “checkoff” programs intended to promote their industries. Checkoff programs gave us slogans like “Got Milk” and “Pork: The Other White Meat,” but they also prop up organizations such as the NCBA or the U.S. Dairy Export Council [[link removed]] that, some farmers argue, serve the interests of processors and large-scale, corporate producers over smaller, independent farmers. In this Farm Bill, Farm Action [[link removed]] wants Congress to mandate more transparency in checkoff programs and restrict the types of lobbying that checkoff dollars can go towards (as proposed by the Opportunities for Fairness in Farming Act [[link removed]]). Looking forward to the next Farm Bill, Farm Action wants checkoff participation to become voluntary (as proposed in the Voluntary Checkoff Program Participation Act [[link removed]]).

Support Struggling Dairies with Supply Management

The U.S. dairy industry is undergoing a rapid loss [[link removed]] of family-scale farms [[link removed]] as the industry consolidates production onto larger, industrial farms. In their Farm Bill platform released Thursday [[link removed]], the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) put a high priority on reforming federal dairy supports. As NFFC’s senior policy associate, Antonio Tovar put it, “we believe that dairy is still viable to be saved from these processes of consolidation, there’s still a lot of family dairy farmers that must be saved before it’s too late.”

A recent report [[link removed]] found that the average dairy farmer managed to turn an annual profit just twice between 2000 and 2021. Milk prices have been below most farmers’ cost of production largely because the U.S. produces more milk than we consume. To survive on lower prices, dairies feel pressure to expand, but the shift to larger more productive farms only perpetuates the milk oversupply. NFFC has a proposal [[link removed]] to implement supply management policies that match milk supply with profitable demand and establish a fair base price based on farm size.

Another dairy campaign, Dairy Together [[link removed]], has a slightly different Farm Bill proposal to discourage overproduction by charging dairy farmers a market access fee if they want to expand beyond an established production base, with larger farms paying higher fees. Dividends from these fees would then support farmers that did not expand.

Phase Out Large, Confined Livestock Farms and Cut Off their Federal Supports

Over 300 [[link removed]] environmental, animal welfare, and public health organizations have endorsed a bold proposal to phase out large, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) by 2040. Senator Booker and Congressman Ro Khanna recently reintroduced [[link removed]] their Farm Systems Reform Act ahead of Farm Bill debates, which would put a moratorium on opening or expanding confined livestock farms that have more than 700 dairy cattle, 2,500 hogs, or 82,000 laying hens and start fining these farms in 2040. The proposal would also direct $100 billion over 10 years to buy out CAFOs or help livestock farmers transition to managed pasture-based practices.

Additionally, a coalition of national and Midwest membership-based agriculture organizations called the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment [[link removed]] has advocated since the 2018 Farm Bill to prevent federal conservation dollars from supporting CAFOs. USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) pays farmers to adopt conservation practices, but increasingly these funds go to large livestock farms to pay for “manure management,” or cleanup of their concentrated waste. In the 2020 fiscal year, 11% of EQIP funds [[link removed]], or $134 million, went to CAFOs. This spending subsidizes fundamentally dirty operations and directs scarce resources away from regenerative and lower-impact farming practices. Over the past decade, 69% of farmers who applied for EQIP funds couldn’t get them, in large part due to insufficient funds. CFFE and other advocates such as NSAC [[link removed]] want to expand EQIP funding and prohibit new and expanding CAFOs from receiving these funds, which past Farm Bills once required.

Looking at the bigger picture, a coalition of more than 35 organizations including the Sierra Club, Farm Action, and the Environmental Working Group, hosted the Food Not Feed summit [[link removed]] earlier this month to rethink federal farm subsidies. Speakers noted that roughly 40 percent [[link removed]] of U.S. corn and 70 percent [[link removed]] of soybeans are used for animal feed, and subsidies for these crops make it cheaper to raise more animals in CAFOs, they argued. Participants want to see more federal support for nutritious fruits and vegetables, which only receive 4% of all federal farm dollars by Farm Action’s estimate [[link removed]].

Combat Corporate Ownership of Farmland

Concentrated farmland ownership lies at the heart of agricultural consolidation. Increasingly, banks [[link removed]], retirement funds [[link removed]], retail investors [[link removed]], and even some nonprofits [[link removed]] and universities [[link removed]] are buying farmland as an investment. This has contributed to land speculation and farmland values nearly doubled [[link removed]] between 2005 and 2019. Preventing further land consolidation by institutional investors is a priority for NFFC’s Farm Bill platform, but this issue is particularly challenging to address at a national level. States control land ownership law [[link removed]], and only eight states [[link removed]] currently ban corporations and investors from owning farmland. That said, Congress has promised and largely failed [[link removed]] to track foreign and corporate farmland ownership in past Farm Bills, and NFFC wants this Farm Bill to mandate that USDA finish the job. To make farmland accessible for beginning and historically disadvantaged farmers, NFFC proposes [[link removed]] more support for land trusts and community-based land tenure models, USDA land grant programs, and more fair and equitable access to federal farm credit.

Plus, Reforming Corporatized Catch Shares for Fisherman

While technically not a part of the Farm Bill, earlier this month family fishermen joined farm advocates in D.C. to lobby for an anti-consolidation policy [[link removed]] of their own: catch-share reform. Not unlike farmland, private equity firms [[link removed]] and “armchair fishermen” are buying up fishing rights and quotas ( called catch shares [[link removed]]) designed to prevent overfishing. But the ability to buy, trade, and lease these shares has driven speculation and consolidation [[link removed]], forcing active fishers to rent shares from absentee owners and creating costly barriers to entry for the next generation of fishermen. The North American Marine Alliance wants a moratorium on all new catch-share programs until Congress can ensure fishing quotas go to active commercial fishermen instead of investors and limit the portion of fishing rights that any one entity can control.

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What We're Reading

The Department of Labor fined a slaughterhouse cleaning contractor for illegally employing over 100 children ranging from 13 to 17 years old to work dangerous overnight shifts sanitizing meat processing equipment at 13 facilities including plants run by JBS, Cargill, Tyson, and others. ( The Guardian [[link removed]])

USDA will provide a total of $59 million in grants to five independent meat processors to expand their operations as part of an effort to diversify meat supply chains. ( USDA [[link removed]] / Politico Pro [[link removed]])

One year after a food safety recall shut down Abbott’s largest infant formula plant and created a nationwide shortage, formula supplies are still not back to normal. Reforms to make the industry safer and less consolidated are also slow-going. ( Food Fix [[link removed]])

About the Open Markets Institute

The Open Markets Institute promotes political, industrial, economic, and environmental resilience. We do so by documenting and clarifying the dangers of extreme consolidation, and by fostering discussions of ways to reestablish America’s political economy on a more stable and fair foundation.

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Written by Claire Kelloway

Edited by Anita Jain

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