Last week, Matt Walsh posted a message that struck a nerve:
“Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader.”
Within hours, the post had spread across X, podcasts, and political commentary. I listened to hours of the discussion, waiting for someone to ask the question I thought mattered most.
How do we make food cheaper without making American farmers poorer than they already are?
Food prices don’t begin at the grocery store. They begin with the economics of producing food, and I think we’ve become increasingly disconnected from what those economics actually are.
Several years ago, I purchased an orange grove in Fillmore, California. While cleaning out the property, I found the handwritten journal of the previous owner, George Campbell. Inside were records of his harvests, expenses, and reflections from the mid-1970s.
Campbell had purchased the entire grove, including the home where he raised his family, for just over $25,000. His first orange harvest brought him approximately $17,000. He wrote that the grove would help send his children to college.
Decades later, I owned that same grove. The trees were older and produced even more fruit than they had in Campbell’s day. Yet my orange check was about $14,000—not adjusted for inflation, the actual check. Meanwhile, the property itself was worth roughly $1 million.
The oranges hadn’t become less productive.
The economics of farming had.
Campbell expected his harvest to pay for his land. Today, many farmers hope their land will someday pay for the losses from their harvests.
Somewhere along the way, the relationship between what farmland costs and what farmland produces broke apart. Today, a farmer isn’t simply competing against another farmer. They’re competing against developers, investors, lifestyle buyers, and increasingly industrial-scale “clean energy” projects that can often pay more for land than agriculture can.
None of those uses are inherently wrong. But we should stop pretending they don’t affect the cost of producing food. Every time productive farmland becomes more valuable because of speculation or development than because of what it can produce, it becomes more difficult for the next generation of farmers to enter agriculture.
We often hear that young people no longer want to farm. I’m not convinced that’s true. I think a better question is whether they can afford to.
U.S. Department of Agriculture data show that many farm households now rely heavily on income earned away from the farm to support their families and keep their operations alive. Parents postpone retirement. Husbands and wives work second jobs. Children contribute countless hours of unpaid labor simply because they’re family. That’s not an agricultural economy thriving through profitability. It’s one surviving through sacrifice.
America has become extraordinarily good at creating wealth, but increasingly poor at creating producers.
For much of our history, wealth was created by producing tangible things. We built machinery, automobiles, furniture, clothing, and food. Today, a growing share of wealth is generated by technology, finance, real estate, data, intellectual property, and financial markets. Those industries have created extraordinary prosperity, and I don’t dismiss their value.
But they also shape how we think.
When your work is disconnected from producing physical necessities, it’s easy to believe every problem has another optimization waiting to be discovered.
Agriculture doesn’t always work that way.
Food is still produced in the physical world. It depends on water, healthy soil, weather, biology, and time. A calf still takes more than two years to become beef. An orange tree cannot be convinced to ripen fruit faster because inflation has increased. Farmers have embraced remarkable efficiencies, but there are biological realities that cannot be negotiated.
Nature doesn’t care about our economic theories.
That disconnect helps explain why conversations about food often feel so detached from farming itself. We hear the price of groceries and assume someone must be making too much money. We rarely stop to ask what it actually costs to produce food in a world where land, fuel, equipment, taxes, insurance, labor, and processing continue to rise.
Ironically, while agriculture became dramatically more efficient, consumers moved farther away from the people producing their food. Processing, transportation, distribution, finance, and retail all became increasingly specialized. Each serves a purpose, but each also takes a share of the food dollar. Consumers pay more for food; farmland has become dramatically more expensive, yet farmers often receive a surprisingly small share of what Americans spend to eat.
That brings me back to Walsh’s point.
He’s right that Americans are worried about grocery prices. They should be. Every American wants affordable food.
But what exactly is supposed to become cheaper?
The land?
The diesel?
The labor?
The processing?
Or the farmer?
Because beef should cost at least what it takes to responsibly raise a steer. Vegetables should cost what it takes to build healthy soil, irrigate fields, harvest crops, and pay the people doing the work. If those costs don’t disappear, someone absorbs them.
More often than not, it’s the farmer.
There are only a handful of ways to make food cheaper. We can ask American farmers to earn less. We can subsidize food through taxpayers. Or we can increasingly rely on imports.
I’m not arguing that America should never import food. Trade has always been part of agriculture. But America is capable of producing far more of its own food than it currently does, and every time we rely on imports simply because they’re cheaper than domestic production, we become more dependent on other countries for something we are entirely capable of producing ourselves.
The goal isn’t isolation.
The goal is resilience.
Is food production a matter of national security?
I believe the answer is unquestionably yes.
A nation that cannot reliably feed itself is vulnerable, regardless of how advanced its military or technology may be. Food isn’t nostalgia. It isn’t a lifestyle. Food is life. Every American depends on it every single day.
If food production is national security, then investing in farmers is investing in national security. Instead of focusing almost exclusively on subsidizing commodities, we should also be asking how to help more people own productive farmland.
Imagine long-term, low- or zero-interest loans tied to keeping land in agricultural production. The qualification wouldn’t be whether your parents farmed. It would be whether you intend to produce food and keep that land feeding your community.
The more farmers we have in our communities, the stronger those communities become. Local food systems shorten the distance between farmers and consumers, allowing more of every food dollar to stay with the person who actually produces the food.
That strengthens farm families, local economies, and America’s resilience.
Walsh started an important conversation.
I’d simply like to continue it.
Because the question isn’t simply how to make food cheaper.
It’s how to make farming economically possible.
We have become extraordinarily good at creating wealth, but increasingly poor at creating producers. If we continue rewarding everything surrounding food production more than food production itself, we shouldn’t be surprised when fewer people choose to farm.
The price of food doesn’t begin in the supermarket.
The price beneath your grocery bill begins with whether America still values the people willing to produce it.
