Simple,

Corporations sold milk at a lower price than local dairy farmers could sell it at and still make money. Just like anything else. If I can sell a widget at a loss in your market to drive you out of business because you cannot sell it at the same price or cheaper due to your operating costs, you go out of business.

But when the farmers went out of business, they did not sell their land, as much of it was family land, they just sold the cows and farm equipment.

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Posted by CitizenK

Member since Aug 2019

14988 posts

Posted on 11/25/25 at 10:35 pm to Strannix

I remember when rice farmers in SW LA made serious bank. The Cadillac dealer in Lake Chuck had salesmen just deliver new models to farmer wives an pick up a personal check with the trade in of last year's car. The US stopped giving shiploads of rice away to foreign nations and that market prices dropped like a rock. Farmers who had borrowed more to live the good life than for business went bankrupt.

As for corporate farms, it was nothing for a company to farm 20,000 acres a year in rice, and rotate with cattle and soybeans on the remaining acreage. Instead of farm hands living on the farms now and working for the company, sharecroppers will farm 5,000 acres each and make bank for themselves. Sometimes the landowner will pay for the second crop to be trampled with a water buffalo, a farm implement to make it better for goose/duck hunting. So the small farmer who share crops will beside his small farm, or team up with other small farmers do actually make good money.

A big problem with soybean happened 15+ years ago, when they invested in biodiesel plants most have gone bankrupt. Their target market was Europe but the EU put a $1 per gallon tariff on US biodiesel to keep competition from their palm oil diesel which has been deoxygenated and isomerized into something similar to regular diesel.

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