by Jack Farish
The Missouri Rural Crisis Center (MRCC) is about fighting for rural people, according to Tim Gibbons. Motivated to fight injustice, Gibbons began working with MRCC in 2005, and now serves as director of communications.
“Our work is focused on farm and food justice,” said Gibbons. “We came out of the 1980s farm crisis as a collection of farmers who were already organizing in Missouri.”
The farm crisis Gibbons mentioned began in the late 1970s with an unprecedented economic and technological boom.
“Farmers were buying land and new technology,” Gibbons said. “But then we entered a rural recession. Farmers had loans they couldn’t pay for and the USDA, the dominant lender at the time, was foreclosing on farms.”
The Rise of Corporate Agriculture
By the 1980s, a new economic reality, in combination with new legal policy and industrialization of agriculture, began to discourage the family-farm model.
As a cause for this shift, Gibbons cites a change in antitrust policy. Around this time, influenced by the policy directives of U.S. Attorney General Robert Bork, courts around the country began to approach antitrust cases from the standpoint of “consumer welfare.”
“When corporations are merging, they go to the regulator and say ‘it’s going to be good for consumers,”’ said Gibbons. “But mergers don’t save consumers money. Mergers allow monopolists to charge more, because there is less competition.”
“When they changed the antitrust from eliminating concentration in markets to the consumer-welfare standard, it allowed for the corporate takeover of the farm and food system,” Gibbons explained.
Gibbons also pointed out that agriculture was becoming more industrial, further discouraging independent farming.
“Land grant universities, enticed by corporate money and also using public funds, came up with industrial livestock production methods,” said Gibbons. According to Gibbons, these methods led to overproduction, which disrupted the hog market in Missouri.
Although industrial agriculture has been successful, it harms local economies.
“The goal of corporate agribusiness is to extract wealth from farmers, communities, and our state,” Gibbons said. “Because of corporate extraction, rural main streets that used to be bustling are boarded up. Keeping money local, by making sure farmers get a fair price, provides for a more vibrant economy.”
Industrial livestock production also impacts the health of environments and of people. Gibbons pointed out the former system of agriculture was based on diversified independent family farms.
Farmers grew crops that were fed to the livestock, then their waste went back into the field as fertilizer, which grew more crops for the livestock. This closed loop is based on natural systems and maintained a healthier environment.
“Now you have thousands – sometimes tens of thousands – of sows concentrated in small buildings,” said Gibbons. Beneath the buildings are lagoons filled with waste. “When they pump the lagoons, it spreads waste on the land.”
On diversified family farms, that waste is spread out. “Now they’re concentrating huge amounts of liquid manure in a small space. This negatively impacts water quality.”
For the sake of stronger economies and healthier environments, MRCC fights for independent farming.
“Our goal is to keep independent farmers on the land and to pass land down to the next generation,” Gibbons stated. “The vast majority of farmers in our country and state are independent family farmers.”
Gibbons is concerned that the traditional farm is at risk.
“Missouri was always a major hog-producing state. We went from 23,000 (producers) in 1985 to 2,200, according to the 2022 agriculture census,” said Gibbons, referring to the USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture data for Missouri. “That’s farmers getting put out of business, and that’s because corporations took over the marketplace,” he explained. “They monopolized, they vertically integrated, and they intentionally overproduced.”
With such a vast supply and access to multiple parts of the supply chain, the corporations were able to drive prices below the cost of production and kick independent farmers out of the market according to Gibbons.
At the time, MRCC demanded that the government enforce antitrust laws.
“Now we are fighting for independent cattle production,” said Gibbons. “The same policies we were fighting for in the 1990s to save hog production, we are now fighting for to save cattle production.”
MRCC’s fight to protect the interests of independent farmers, as well as the interests of consumers, relies on promoting a fair marketplace.
As Gibbons put it, “MRCC’s goal is to make sure that producers get a fair price and consumers aren’t being gouged.”
“The fiduciary responsibility of agribusiness corporations is to make as much money as they can for their share-holders,” Gibbons said. “Their goal is to pay producers less, and make consumers pay more, so that they can make as much money as possible in the middle.”
According to Gibbons, corporations have managed to take over the market and be so successful, not because their approach is better for our society, but because of policies, and in some cases, the lack of policies, that have allowed them to achieve their goals.
“Our current system isn’t based on inevitability,” Gibbons said. “It is based on policy decisions.”
These policy decisions, according to Gibbons, are based less on the will of the people and more on the interests of the powerful corporations they benefit.
“What the work at MRCC has made clear is that policy is not based on real democracy,” Gibbons said. “It’s based on a democratic process that is highly controlled by big money and corporate special interests.”
Promoting Independent Farms
Gibbons explained that there are many ways to support independent farmers. MRCC runs a program called Patchwork Family Farms, an alternative to the commodity market. The program buys hogs from members, brings them to small meatpacking plants, and then distributes local pork mostly within Missouri.
For Gibbons, Patchwork is an important part of the solution. As he explained, “This market can ensure that farmers get paid a fair price – the cost of production and a living wage.”
But Gibbons emphasized that MRCC’s most direct and effective route to protecting the interests of farmers and consumers is to affect policy. “Alternative markets are not the silver bullet. Independent farmers need an open, fair, and competitive commodity market,” Gibbons said.
He said that bringing about a more fair commodity market requires changes to the policies that are enabling corporate takeover and threatening independent farmers.
MRCC advocates stricter enforcement of antitrust regulation and policies that keep money separate from politics. “If there were one thing that needs to happen it would be getting money out of politics. The second thing would be changing the antitrust definition back so that it targets concentration in markets. But these two are so connected they’re almost interchangeable.”
Environmental Echo 