Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is warning that America's food system is being taken over by powerful corporations, and it's squeezing out small farms while pushing prices higher for consumers.
“In America today, a handful of giant corporations control more of our food system than ever,” Sanders wrote in a recent post on X. “This means record profits for Big Ag—while family farmers are pushed off the land and consumers pay more at the store.”
Small Farms Disappear, Profits Soar For Big Ag
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In an accompanying video, Sanders shared interviews with small and mid-sized farmers who described a broken system. “In the last five years, we’ve lost over 150,000 farms,” the producer said, adding, “Family farmers call it ‘get big or get out.'”
One farmer noted they had to sell their dairy cows a year earlier, a move they said is happening “all over the U.S. for small and mid-sized farms.”
Agricultural expert and author of “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry” Austin Frerick echoed the concern to Bloomberg last year. Despite the illusion of choice in supermarkets, Frerick said the food industry is deeply consolidated. “One company has roughly a 50 to 60% market share” in some categories and that dominance is often hidden behind different store-brand labels.
He said that companies strategically place products at different price points to give wealthier consumers the sense they're buying something better, even when it’s all from the same supplier. “You only find that out usually through recalls,” he added, referencing moments when contamination reveals the true manufacturer across multiple brands.
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Monopolies, Pollution And Struggling Communities
Frerick also highlighted the environmental toll of factory farming. Massive operations produce far more animal waste than they can manage, causing runoff that pollutes local water supplies. “You’re talking about the manure of the population of 75 million people,” he said of Iowa’s hog industry. “Most farmland in Iowa is not owned by Iowans anymore.”
According to Sanders’ video, these mega-farms treat animals like “pieces of machinery,” and the larger they are, the more waste they create. “The water has changed. It’s gotten worse. More nitrates,” one farmer said.
Frerick told Bloomberg that food conglomerates like Cargill expanded their dominance through acquisitions that would have faced scrutiny in earlier eras. “They made a lot of these purchases 30, 40 years ago before the Robert Bork antitrust framework took hold,” he said, referring to a shift in antitrust policy during the 1980s that prioritized consumer prices over broader concerns like market power, worker impact, or competition.
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The result is fewer choices, less competition, and higher prices. According to Frerick, “Americans spend more on food than Italians,” even before recent inflation.
He noted that fresh fruits and vegetables have become more expensive over time, while heavily processed foods have gotten cheaper, a trend he ties to corporate subsidies and a farm bill that encourages overproduction of grains like corn.
Wall Street has also moved in, seeing farmland as a limited asset. “There’s a lot of land being bought up by Wall Street investment firms because, like they say, there’s only so much land and they’re not making any more of it,” retired dairy farmer Jim Goodman said in Sanders’ video.
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