The USDA was established under Abraham Lincoln in 1862 as part of a suite of policies pushed by the small Northern farmers who made up the base of Lincoln’s Republican Party. In addition to the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, these policies subsidized and accelerated the conversion of Western grasslands into settled agriculture and gave federal backing to the Jeffersonian ideal of small, independent, yeoman farmers—all, of course, on the plundered lands of Indigenous peoples, and doing little for the recently emancipated enslaved people who were excluded from many of the benefits.
This basic logic of serving landowners and producers hasn’t changed substantially even as the country and its agriculture have. In the 1860s, Lincoln had good reason to call the USDA “The People’s Department” since 50 percent of the population lived or worked on farms, and in a country of 31 million there were 1.5 million farms. By the 1930s, this idea still held as the population grew to almost 130 million with 6.8 million farms. Today, however, in a country of 330 million, there are only around 2 million farms, and of those the 5 percent largest operations make up almost 60 percent of all production. Farm workers and operators, meanwhile, make up about only 1.7 percent of the U.S. labor force, even as agricultural output is higher than ever.
Agriculture is now a high-volume and highly capitalized industry where a tiny fraction of farms produce the vast bulk of commodities. USDA policies are a big reason why. By trying, as MIT Professor Deborah Fitzgerald puts it, to turn “every farm into a factory,” the USDA pushed mechanical implements, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and debt-financed, capital- and input-intensive agriculture. Given these incentives, most farmers, whether to grow rich or merely survive, have turned to business models predicated on high-yield monocropping, economies of scale, and farm consolidation. That means fewer, substantially larger farms produce just a handful of commodities or factory-farmed animals. Today, corn, soy, and wheat make up half of all crop sales, and upward of 99 percent of meat, including over 9 billion chickens, comes from factory farms where animals are fattened up on those crops.
This isn’t a pattern either major political party knows how to break: It’s built into the department’s structure and backed by a powerful lobbying apparatus. Farmers and agribusiness furnish the USDA with political capital and the USDA guarantees stable prices for commodity monocrops with minimal regulation. “Conventional farmers,” writes the agricultural critic Daniel Imhoff, “stay afloat by farming the system rather than growing what might best serve their particular tract of land for the long term or provide for more well-rounded, healthy diets.” The system serves up the safe bet, but it has also selected, generation after generation, for farmers (and policymakers) who only make safe bets.