1. Farms in the Rural Economy

Many commentators argue that farmers are central to the rural economy, or conflate the farm economy with the rural economy in general.⁴⁸ And this leads many of them to wonder why, with “more farming wealth than ever, farming communities are poorer.”⁴⁹ The typical answer is that monopolies and financial interests have siphoned off farm wealth.

Today, a small number of capital-intensive farms manage hundreds of millions of acres and produce a tremendous amount of commodity calories with a relatively small number of workers. From 1991 to 2015, farms with at least $1 million in sales (adjusted for inflation) increased their share of total production from 31% to 51%.⁵⁰ This increasing dominance of large, industrialized operations has been a major long-term factor in rural depopulation,⁵¹ and researchers have associated the arrival of large-scale industrialized farms with increases in local income inequality and community conflict, as well as pollution.⁵² A study on midwestern counties in the late 2000s found almost no relationship between farm revenues and the non-farm economy.⁵³ A USDA analysis also found that operators on larger farms are more likely to bypass local towns to acquire machinery, farm inputs, and credit.⁵⁴

Not only do most farms appear to have a limited relationship with their surrounding community, their own role in the rural economy is very small. In 2018, farmers made up about 2% of the rural population,⁵⁵ agricultural jobs—including both jobs on farms and those providing goods and services

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to farms—accounted for less than 6% of all jobs in rural counties, and farm jobs produced only about 3% of personal earnings.⁵⁶ The number of counties defined as “farming dependent” by USDA fell about 10% during the 2000s, and the number of farm jobs fell by 14%.⁵⁷

In contrast to the relatively small role that commercial farms and farmers play in rural communities, farmworkers play a larger one.

There are about 2.5 million farmworkers—about twice as many as active farmers.⁶⁰ Farmworkers do two-thirds of the work on commercial farms, where almost all production happens, but receive only a quarter of the wages. Crop workers reported a median annual income between only $17,500 and $20,000 in 2015-2016—a third with family incomes below the poverty line.⁶¹ USDA data suggest that the farmworker’s share of the food

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dollar is about a tenth of the farmer’s. Since there are more farmworkers than farmers, this money gets split up more for the former group, so that their incomes wind up an even smaller fraction than those of farmers.

Farmworkers also see little future under current farm policies. Even though the average farmworker is 41 and has been in farm work for more than 10 years, and though half of crop workers say they want to remain in agriculture until they retire, land is far too expensive and the threshold acreage for commercial agriculture far too high for them to have a realistic chance of becoming operators in the United States. Farmworkers face other barriers as well. About 83% of farmworkers are Hispanic, the average crop worker has only an eighth grade education, and almost two-thirds of crop workers say they cannot even “somewhat” speak English.

These workers are critical stakeholders and their greater involvement in farm policy would likely support more climate-friendly approaches. Farmworker groups have led campaigns for clean water, pesticide protections, and other environmental reforms since the 1960s and they are now at serious risk from climate change, with heat stress as the deadliest threat for farmworkers.⁶² Farmworkers are also vulnerable to wildfires due to the physically demanding outdoor nature of their work,⁶³ and the fact that they often cannot afford to stop working.⁶⁴ In 2018, wildfires burned 1.8 million acres in California, dispersing unsafe levels of smoke for hundreds of miles,⁶⁵ and 2020 was vastly worse. Their interests must be reflected in effective climate-friendly farm policies, and their support will be critical to achieving those policies.