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 2021, the four dominant beef packers, Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Cargill and National Beef, handled 81 percent of steer and heifer processed.
The four largest hog packers, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA, Tyson Foods and Clemens Food Group, handled 65 percent of hog processed.
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.
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 history, home, livelihood, expertise and future off the land and leaves an entire community poorer.
The Problem is Structural
The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 2027 (AAA 2027)
AAA 2027 is a model federal legislative framework designed to prevent farm failure before it occurs.
It establishes rules for agricultural markets that:
improve price transparency
limit excessive concentration and single-point dependence
rebuild distributed regional food infrastructure
provide a limited and voluntary buffer against below-cost market pricing
establish fair agricultural contract standards
allocate systemic risk to the parties best able to manage it
give food production priority for essential resources during declared scarcity
AAA 2027 does not replace private markets or guarantee farm income. It is designed to preserve competition, market access, regional capacity and continuity of food production.
Results From the 2026 Farm Listening Tour
We listened to farmers from 19 states; they had a lot to say.
Why This Matters Now
The current system is optimized for efficiency under ideal conditions. It is not designed to survive disruption.
Trade shocks, interest-rate shifts, infrastructure failure, resource competition and geopolitical instability now propagate through a highly consolidated system with minimal redundancy.
The results are predictable:
losses are absorbed at the farm level
consolidation accelerates
resilience declines
This is not cyclical instability. It is structural exposure.
What This Requires
Food systems are critical infrastructure.
Other systems of comparable importance, banking, energy, airline travel and telecommunications, are governed with explicit rules to prevent cascading failure. Food production is not.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 2027 applies the same standard:
Design the system to survive stress, not merely perform under ideal conditions.