How do farmers get paid?

January 2, 2017 One thing I want to get across with this blogging is a sense of what farmers do. After all, it’s easy for farmers to see what city folks do—it’s all over the media. But it’s hard for city folks to get much more than a surface view of rural culture. First thing to understand is that all farmers are business people who are not on a salary paid by the boss. Every farm you drive by on your way from City A to City B is a business. We have to sell what we raise. And the income usually comes from the international market, with prices set far away. Unless we sell at the farmers’ market, or another small, specialty auction or such, we have no control over how much we get. But, in general, it’s a fraction of what you pay at the store. Most of the price of, say, a can of soup or a box of cereal, goes to processors. Those processors are giant corporations, mostly, and when they buy raw ingredients they want to pay as little as possible. That means that the farmer is squeezed. Worse, for consumers, there’s very little incentive for farmers to raise their raw products in a way that’s better than anyone else. Unlike most independent business people, they don’t get paid for being better than their competitors. If you're selling grain, it just gets dumped into a humongous bin with everybody else's grain. There might be a little bonus depending on your region, or a bump if you bring in really gorgeous Angus cattle instead of scrawny holsteins, but, to the processors, ingredients are ingredients. Certainly not the way the average business would charge for services—think of your lawyer, your cable tv company, your masseuse, your favorite artist. Some farmers think they can game the system by teaming up with corporations and setting up Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. It turns out to be a lose/lose proposition because the corporations don’t give up their profits to their captive labor. But, going into it, the CAFO guys think they can beat the independents. So, what is it that keeps us on the farm, when we have so little control over our income? Habit, I guess. Or, maybe, the view.