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.
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.