Commentary
I have been beating this drum for years. We traded resilience for fragility in American farming. After the Green Revolution, we abandoned the way our grandparents farmed with rotating crops, integrated livestock, and multiple income streams on one piece of land. Instead, we bought into the “go big or get out” model. Whole landscapes that once grew diverse crops and supported families have been plowed under and replaced with endless rows of monocrops. One of the biggest of these is soybeans.
Soy is in almost everything you eat in America. It is in animal feed, cooking oils, fillers, and an astonishing amount of processed foods. I do not hate soy. I was vegan most of my life, I have eaten my share of tofu, and my daughter loves edamame. She is even growing it right now in her homeschool garden. We also seed soy into cover crops we plant for our cattle forage. Soy itself is not the problem. The problem is that it makes up such a huge portion of what American farmers grow while our survival depends on whether one buyer across the ocean decides to show up.
Here is the truth most people do not realize. China is the soybean market. They buy around 60 percent of all soybeans traded worldwide, more than 100 million tons a year. Even if the United States captured every other soybean buyer in the world, it would not equal 40 percent of China’s appetite. That is how dominant they are. And yet, as our harvest begins this year, China has not booked a single new order of U.S. soybeans. That silence has already sent futures tumbling and cash bids shrinking. Farmers are rolling into town with grain carts full of beans and watching their margins vanish by the day. China can afford to wait. They have stockpiled soy at record levels, giving them the luxury of deciding when and if to buy. American farmers do not have that option. We are leveraged to the hilt. Most families take on debt all year long and then pay it off in one lump sum at harvest. If the price collapses there is no cushion.
Here is the double stab in the heart. Even as China withholds orders, we are still buying their agrochemicals. Our fields are hooked on seeds and sprays tied to foreign companies, sometimes the very same companies producing pharmaceuticals. They sell us the chemicals that weaken our soils and bodies and then sell us the pills to treat the consequences. We have made ourselves dependent on China not only to consume our products but also for the purchase of the inputs we need to grow them. To make matters worse, the United States has now become a net importer of food. We no longer grow enough to feed our own people.
This is not an abstract trade dispute. It is people’s lives. Between 2017 and 2022, America lost almost 142,000 farms. In Texas alone more than 17,000 disappeared during that same window and over 1.6 million acres of farmland vanished. Last year Texas lost 4,000 farms in just 12 months. At the same time the U.S. cattle herd has shrunk to its lowest levels since the 1940s. We now rely on imported meat from South America and elsewhere just to meet demand while our own beef cow herd keeps shrinking. I talk to farmers every week who feel trapped. They have specialized their equipment, borrowed heavily, and built their whole system around soy or corn. Just like the cotton farmers who have been stuck at 1970s prices for decades, they do not feel as though they have a way out.
I am not raising these alarms because I dislike chemicals or because I want everyone to farm exactly as I do (although I do). I am raising them because the system is collapsing right in front of us. We have been arrogant, pretending endless monocrops are sustainable and that foreign markets will always be there. We have been blind, ignoring that reliance on China both to buy our crops and to supply our inputs leaves us dangerously exposed. And we have been forgetful, shrugging off Wendell Berry’s reminder that “eating is an agricultural act.” Farming is not a nostalgic lifestyle of a bygone era. It is the foundation of all life because every one of us must eat.
Resilience does not come from betting the whole farm on one crop and one buyer. It comes from diversity. That means integrating animals back onto the land because cows, pigs, and chickens provide natural fertilizer, cycle nutrients, and add another stream of income. It means rebuilding local meat processing so animals do not have to travel long distances to massive plants that raise costs and create bottlenecks. It means diversifying crops so soy can stay in the rotation but does not dominate entire regions. It means rolling back regulations to let farmers sell food directly into their communities, to schools, hospitals, and neighbors, instead of forcing everything through the commodity system. And it means realigning policy so that we reward resilience through soil health, crop rotation, and family scale farming rather than sheer output measured in bushels.
I know I sound like a broken record on regenerative agriculture, crop diversity, and getting off the agrochemical treadmill. But it is not because I am a hippie who hates chemicals in the water. It is because this fragile system is crushing farmers, erasing rural communities, and leaving our nation dependent on foreign powers to consume our products and to supply our inputs at the very moment we have become a net importer of food. Resilience is not optional. It is survival. Until we face the truth, American farmers will keep sliding into bankruptcy while foreign powers continue to hold the keys to our dinner plates and scoop up the land as American farmers close up shop.
