Food Security is National Security
Abundance Is Not Security
The United States has built one of the most productive agricultural systems in history.
Even as farms and ranches continue to fail, the extraordinary productivity of those that remain conceals the system’s growing fragility.
The Farm Security Initiative (FSI) is an independent, nonpartisan agricultural advocacy group addressing the structural forces driving farm loss, rural poverty and fragility in the American food system.
Our mission is to generate and propose federal policy that preserves competition, producer market access, regional capacity and continuity of American food production.
We’re Losing Our Farms
By the numbers:
Between 2017 and 2025, the United States lost more than 177,000 farms, an average of 61 farms per day. One farm every 24 minutes.
In 2025, the number of farms declined in every sales class except operations with annual sales of $1 million or more, a group comprising 6.2 percent of American farms.
USDA forecasts that in 2026, median income earned from farming by farm households will be negative $1,161, farm-sector debt will reach $624.7 billion and operating capital will shrink by 9.2 percent.
Bayer and Corteva supplied seed planted on 72 percent of U.S. corn acres and 66 percent of soybean acres.
CF Industries, Nutrien, Koch and Yara-USA account for 75 percent of U.S. nitrogen fertilizer.
In 2019, the four dominant beef packers, Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Cargill and National Beef, handled 85 percent of steer and heifer slaughter. The four largest hog packers, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA, Tyson Foods and Clemens Food Group, handled 67 percent of hog slaughter.
In 2025, BNSF and Union Pacific originated 67 percent of U.S. Class I grain carloads.
The immediate cost of this concentration is not an empty grocery shelf. The statistics come first: the consolidation by highly capitalized, multinational corporations, the declining farm numbers, the negative farm income, the farm failures, the rural poverty.
The immediate cost is another family leaving the land and another rural community made poorer. The empty grocery shelf comes later.
Sources: USDA NASS, Economic Research Service and Agricultural Marketing Service; Surface Transportation Board.
The Problem Is Not the Farmer
Farmers are told to borrow, diversify, hedge or adapt. For decades, the industry refrain has been “Get big or get out.” But management cannot solve the basic arithmetic of buying from concentrated suppliers and selling to concentrated buyers.
Farmers and ranchers commit labor, money, seed, fertilizer, equipment, insurance and land without knowing what their crops or livestock will bring months or years in the future. Their livelihood depends on the margin between costs and sale prices, but both are shaped in markets dominated by the multinational companies named above.
Those companies act within the law and according to ordinary business practice when they protect their own margins. They have neither an obligation nor a market incentive to ensure that an individual farm earns a profit or survives. Their behavior is entirely lawful and rational.
Farms and ranches are the economic engines of rural America. The money they earn moves through equipment dealers, veterinarians, banks and businesses and supports the local tax base. When a greater share of the profit is captured by companies headquartered elsewhere, wealth created in rural America leaves the region and accrues elsewhere as corporate earnings and shareholder returns.
A failing farm takes a family, its identity, history, home, livelihood, expertise and future off the land and leaves an entire community poorer.
The Problem Is Structural
Across American agriculture, production is distributed among some 1.8 million farms and ranches, while a few dozen highly capitalized national and multinational companies dominate and control both essential inputs and the processing, storage and transportation systems farmers and ranchers must use to reach the market.
That concentration creates control points: essential steps in food production and distribution that a farmer or rancher cannot readily bypass.
Those control points include suppliers of seed, feed, fertilizer, chemicals and equipment; elevators, storage facilities, processors and commodity buyers; and railroads.
At each point, these dominant companies determine how much the producer must pay or will be paid.
The companies controlling these points vary by commodity, but the dynamic remains the same: large corporations protect their own profit margins at the expense of farmers and ranchers. This is not a temporary market condition or a collection of isolated abuses.
This is the operating structure permitted by American law.
When weather, biology or markets cause agricultural losses, the federal government may, at political discretion, compensate producers after the fact. It does not change the structure itself. The United States repeatedly pays to keep farmers in business while preserving the structure that drives them out.
To protect our food supply, the law must change.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 2027
A Structural Solution
AAA 2027 is FSI’s model federal legislative framework for changing the rules that govern agricultural markets before farm failure requires another public rescue.
It restores price transparency and competition, limits concentration and single-point dependence, rebuilds distributed regional infrastructure and requires sufficient independently controlled capacity to preserve producer market access during disruption.
AAA 2027 does not replace private markets or guarantee farm income. It establishes public guardrails designed to preserve competition, regional capacity and continuity of American food production.