When did we decide the purpose of American agriculture was to win an export race?
Every time I fly across this country, I find myself looking out the window in awe. From 30,000 feet, you can see the fingerprints of generations of farmers. Every irrigated circle, every terraced hillside, every fence line and every field carved from wilderness represents countless hours of labor, ingenuity, and sacrifice. Long before GPS-guided tractors and satellites measured yields, families transformed this landscape into one of the most productive agricultural regions the world has ever known.
They didn’t build it to climb an export ranking. They built it to feed their families, their neighbors, and their country.
Today, we measure success differently. We celebrate record harvests, rising yields, and billions of dollars in exports. We compare ourselves to Brazil and the rest of the world as though the highest export number is the ultimate prize.
But is it?
We are told American agriculture is one of the most efficient systems in the world. That statement deserves a closer look.
Efficient by what measure?
If a system cannot support the people operating it, is it actually efficient? If farmers increasingly rely on government support to survive, and if most farm households now earn the majority of their income away from the farm, with roughly 85 percent of that household income coming from off-farm sources, have we confused production with prosperity? A system that produces mountains of commodities but cannot sustain the people producing them may be incredibly productive, but productivity and efficiency are not the same thing.
Someone asked me on a podcast yesterday how a first-generation farmer is supposed to make the economics work.
I wish I had a good answer.
I don’t, because I’m still trying to figure it out myself.
Like so many farmers, we have expanded our scope rather than simply our scale. There is only so much debt a few hundred acres can support. Instead of trying to buy more land, we built a farm stand. We opened an on-farm restaurant. We host events and festivals. We create products from what we grow. We invite families onto the ranch to experience agriculture firsthand.
Every one of those enterprises was born from the same question.
How do you make farming pay?
I don’t say that as a complaint. I love what we’ve built. I love seeing children jump on the bounce house, families eating pizza made from ingredients we raise, people discovering where food comes from, and guests leaving with a deeper appreciation for agriculture. But I also recognize that much of what we’ve built exists because farming alone has become so difficult to make financially sustainable.
Buying land, servicing agricultural loans, investing in infrastructure, weathering droughts, floods, and volatile markets is incredibly difficult. It was difficult when I farmed in California. It is difficult now in Texas for different reasons.
The pressure is real. The struggle is real. There are days when it is exhausting.
That is why I struggle when I hear American agriculture described as the most efficient system in the world.
If the people producing our food cannot make a living producing food, what exactly are we being efficient at?
That is not a criticism of farmers.
It is a question about the system we have built.
America is blessed with fertile soil, diverse climates, and year-round growing conditions across much of the country. We have the ability to grow an astonishing variety of foods. Yet we increasingly optimize for commodity production, exports, and fuel instead of asking a much simpler question.
How well could we feed ourselves?
Diversification is not a step backward. It is resilience.
That does not mean every farm should stop growing corn or soybeans. Commodity crops have an important place in American agriculture. But diversity has always been nature’s insurance policy. It should also be agriculture’s.
Innovation is not always about becoming bigger. Sometimes it is about becoming broader. Some farms will grow more acres. Others will add livestock, produce, direct sales, agritourism, or food processing. The goal should not simply be producing more of the same commodity. The goal should be creating farms that are resilient enough to survive and communities resilient enough to feed themselves.
The conversation about agriculture also needs a broader definition of efficiency.
Is it efficient if taxpayers subsidize production? Is it efficient if food travels halfway around the world while fertile farmland surrounds the communities eating it? Is it efficient if rural towns continue to disappear while yields continue to rise? Is it efficient if the people feeding the country cannot support their families by farming alone?
Those questions matter just as much as bushels per acre.
If Brazil becomes the world’s largest agricultural exporter, congratulations to them.
That is not the race I want America to win.
Let Brazil become the export superpower. Let them produce the most bushels or the most pounds per acre.
I want America to become the most resilient agricultural nation in the world.
Let’s become the country where farmers can earn a living by farming. Let’s become the country where healthy soils improve every year. Let’s become the country where communities are nourished by nearby farms. Let’s become the country that measures success by its ability to feed itself, withstand disruption, and pass healthy land to the next generation.
We have the land. We have the climate. We have generations of agricultural knowledge. We have some of the most innovative farmers in the world.
We don’t need to win the export race.
We need to win the resilience race.
If we can build an agricultural system where farmers no longer need a second job to keep the farm, where government subsidies become the exception rather than the expectation, where our communities are fed by diversified local farms, and where the next generation can afford to enter agriculture with hope instead of fear, I would call that the greatest agricultural success story in the world.
Because if feeding the world requires the very people producing that food to depend on off-farm income and government assistance simply to survive, then we have not built the world’s most efficient agricultural system.
We’ve simply become very good at measuring the wrong things.
