“Corporate Farming: Pushing Family Farmers Over the Brink”
a Guest Editorial Submitted by:

Thomas Linzey, Esq. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)

The recent hullabaloo - over another attempt by several State Senators to strip away local control over factory farms - has pushed corporate factory farming back into the limelight.

For many rural communities in Pennsylvania, it never left.

Although the controversy at the state level has been framed mostly as a debate focused on the environmental damage caused by factory farming, independent family farmers know all too well that corporate farming poses another threat: to their economic survival.

Factory farms, of course, are merely a symptom of a much larger problem – the corporatization of agriculture driven by four corporations which now control between 60% and 80% of meat production in this country. Those agribusiness corporations, true to form, are now attempting to eliminate the last of their independent family livestock competitors.

To the corporations, it’s nothing personal. It’s all about market share.

State Senator Noah Wenger (R-Lancaster) once proclaimed on the floor of the Senate that he didn’t know what a factory farm was.

Senator Wenger and others have tried for years to confuse the real issue by focusing on factory farms – and not on the corporate actors creating the corporate factory farm model. Those Senators and the agribusiness lobby intentionally seek to blur the lines between corporate farming and family farming – in the hopes that people will become resigned to merely regulating the operation of factory farms to avoid environmental problems.

Many people in other states, however, have always had a clear vision of the type of sustainable, family farm-based agriculture they wanted. Instead of indirectly validating a factory farm model by merely regulating the environmental effects of factory farms, they have simply banned corporate farming.

In fact, people in nine states in the Midwest have always distinguished corporate farming from family farming. Starting in 1904 in places like Oklahoma, residents and farmers joined together to ban absentee agribusiness corporate ownership or control of farms. Close to a dozen Pennsylvania Townships have followed suit – prohibiting non-family owned corporations from owning farmland or controlling farms.

When does a once independent family farm become a corporate farm? Obviously, if an agribusiness corporation purchases a farm operation, the farm becomes a corporate farm. Less obvious is when a family farm continues to own the farm’s land and buildings, but turns control of the farm over to a livestock corporation.

Indeed, several decades ago, agribusiness corporations stopped purchasing farms outright. The reason? They didn’t want the environmental liability that came with owning factory farms. So, the corporations decided to use once-independent family farmers to raise livestock for them. Corporate seizure of increasing market share over livestock production guaranteed that the corporations could frame farmers with a choice that was no choice at all: either go corporate or quit farming.

Through one-sided agreements labeled “output contracts”, the farmer now no longer owns the animals, and the farmer no longer has control over their feed and medicine. The farmer assumes a quarter to a half million dollar mortgage to finance the construction of mostly automated factory farm buildings, while remaining on the liability hook for manure spills and air pollution. Worst of all, the corporation can terminate the contract at any time - leaving the farmer with nothing but empty promises and no ability to continue farming.

In places like Northern Arkansas, where over 130 once independent farm families watched as their hog contracts were terminated by the Tyson Foods Corporation overnight in a corporate boardroom, farm families are left stranded without an income, with overflowing manure lagoons, and without the financial ability to farm again. Welcome to corporate farming.

Score: agribusiness corporations 130, independent family farmers 0.

Now, through the corporate farming model, 95% of all hogs are raised under similar output contracts in places like North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, over 3,000 independent family hog farmers have been eliminated over the past twenty years. Livestock auctions have closed across the country, because open, competitive markets for hogs simply don’t exist anymore.

Thus, to talk about factory farms as solely an environmental problem falls far short of the real debate. Regulating factory farms without confronting agribusiness corporate concentration of livestock production all but guarantees a future scenario of increased environmental and economic damage. It also guarantees the extinction of independent family farmers and the rural communities they support. The real discussion must involve the question of whether we want corporate farms or independent family farms raising the food that we all eat.

It is time to explicitly and legislatively recognize the right of rural communities to choose the type of agriculture they believe is sustainable – both economically and environmentally. Perhaps that would be the essence of local control and self-government – a validation of the democratic ideal. It is also time to confront the powers asserted by corporations that now trump our ability to chart sustainable futures in rural Pennsylvania.

One thing is for sure. If we don’t stand up now – by rejecting the corporate farming model and enabling local communities to eliminate and control corporate farms – we will no longer have a choice about the kind of agriculture that we want in this country.