Well, this is MY last post on the farmers (welfare) package....

[Red Mountain]

25. I hate to argue this point but I think you're mistaken

This is from Wikipedia (and a bit dated) but more current info seems to me to indicate things aren't all that different now. Biggest change doesn't seem to be the number of non-family corporate farms going up but that the ones that exist are controlling more land as a percentage of land farmed.

This doesn't mean that corporations aren't asserting too much control over farmers......either through contract growing, gmo seed, chemicals or just plain controlling the market for farm products but you get the idea. It is NOT a free market and the truly independent farmer has a tough time surviving the inevitable dips in commodity market prices.

I'm a small family farmer. One of these days I really need to get around to forming a llc which will make me a....drum roll.....corporate farmer.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming

The 2012 US Census of Agriculture indicates that 5.06 percent of US farms are corporate farms. These include family corporations (4.51 percent) and non-family corporations (0.55 percent). Of the family farm corporations, 98 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Of the non-family farm corporations, 90 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area. Family farms (including family corporate farms) account for 96.7 percent of US farms and 89 percent of US farmland area;[26] a USDA study estimated that family farms accounted for 85 percent of US gross farm income in 2011.[27] Other farmland in the US is accounted for by several other categories, including single proprietorships where the owner is not the farm operator, non-family partnerships, estates, trusts, cooperatives, collectives, institutional, research, experimental and American Indian Reservation farms.

In the US, the average size of a non-family corporate farm is 1078 acres, i.e. smaller than the average family corporate farm (1249 acres) and smaller than the average partnership farm (1131 acres).[26]