With US beef prices soaring to record highs, you might think that South Dakota cattle rancher Eric Gropper would be celebrating.
Yet while the cost of the meat in US supermarkets is now 12% higher than it was a year ago, a rise more than three times the rate of general inflation, Gropper says that he and all the other beef farmers aren’t making any more profit than usual.
The capitalist and the farmer are the same person tbh. Most US food supply is corporate farms now, not small time farmers.
There are a great many small time farmers. They are not capitalist. They get by month to month like the rest of us.
Farmers are generally very wealthy people. That is the inevitable result of a century of farm consolidations. Most farmers are not true farmers in the traditional sense. They operate large “family farms” that are just family-owned businesses in the same was Johnson and Johnson is a family business. The large number of migrant workers and farm hands they hire do the real work. But the actual guy who owns the land, whose family has had the land for five generations? That is literally just landed gentry.
Some of them I guess. One of farmers south of here who does own six hundred acres was involved in a serious accident on the farm when he was in his 70’s Two weeks later he is back out there over the objections of his whole family working harder then you can get the average twenty something to work these days. Personally I disliked him but you couldn’t call him lazy or uninvolved. My experience doesn’t match your description. It may be different elsewhere but I don’t see it your way.
Sorry, was mistaken, only 5% of farmland is corporations. The average farm size is still fucking massive though. Over 440 hectares/1100 acres. That’s a LOT of land and essentially it’s still capitalism, the capital being the land and machinery. Like around 4 million dollars worth of land on average per farm. That means the bigger family farms are likely sitting on tens of millions worth of land.
There are also around 400k documented seasonal immigrant workers helping those farmers every year, as well as who knows how many undocumented ones that nobody pays taxes on. So I have my suspicions that most of the family farms aren’t mostly worked by said families.