Almost 100 years since the dust bowl! History sure does rhyme.

>“Right now, if I was to walk into Congress and ask all the senators and reps, ‘Who thinks the agriculture industry is hurting to the point of collapse?’ all the hands would go up. Instead, the question should be, ‘Who thinks farmers are hurting to the point of collapse?’”

>“There’s a giant difference between the two questions, and that difference is indicative of the separation between local Ag and Big Ag,” Buffalo concludes. “Farmers, not the giant agriculture manufacturers, are the ones hurting to the point of going belly up. There’s no solving any of this until that difference is recognized.”

I'm not quite gripping why lower-scale farmers are hurting more than "agriculture manufacturers"-- or why those two things should be compared directly. This article seems to conflate agricultural suppliers and industrial-scale agriculture (aka farming.)

If it is that small scale farms are less efficient? Then yeah, you're going to need bail-outs WITH BETTER PLANNING, OVERSIGHT, and eventually OUTCOMES, if we want small scale farmers to continue existing (which, btw, I am all for.) Do that while also monopoly-busting suppliers of farming inputs. Also, maybe it sounds like fixing short-term profit motive shareholder capitalism might be implied. hah. But you'd have to do it in a global market-aware framework, as other governments meddle with ag markets in a sometimes adversarial way.

To bring it back to the dust bowl, one of the few actually effective programs was to improve ecological practices that prevented dust from blowing as much. And restoration of buffalo grass from buying out farmers' lands and letting it re-naturalize.

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Fun: this article is really heavy on the "for defense", "security" language, even bringing up the Chinese spy balloon for basically no reason. I guess cynically that makes sense. I suppose the irony of pandering to the current crop of American right-wing politicians-- who are accelerating the private-equity gobble-up hellhole expansion faster than ever-- might be lost.

It’s not just a federal issue though. States like Oregon keep squeezing farmers with heavy handed regulations that seem to be designed to kill small farmers in particular. There are YouTube channels that cover the constant stream of rule changes and orders that make life hard for them.