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Farmers, farming

Thursday 2nd of October 2025

Farmers … the administration doled out $8.5bn and $14.3bn to farmers and ranchers in 2018 and 2019 respectively, to compen- sate them for the hit from the trade war. Another $30bn of aid has followed this year to fight the slump  caused by Covid-19. These are striking numbers. But doubly so, given how unevenly this aid has been spread: farmers in Democrat- dominated California were largely excluded, but those in Trump-leaning areas such as North Dakota and Iowa received much more. Gillian Tett, Financial Times, Oct. 21, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Farmers say We're going to have to learn the table manners of sitting at a bigger table. That's hard for our psyche.  Illinois farmer commenting on the increased foreign competition and lost market share confronting America's farmers, quoted in Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Farming According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, median on-farm income (as opposed to off-farm income from working other jobs) has averaged a negative $1,569 per year from 1996 to 2017. More than half of farm households now lose money from farming. They keep going only because family members work other jobs. The Nation, February 18, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Farming From the 1960s to the '80s, about a third of each dollar American shoppers spent on groceries went back to farmers; in 2016, according to the Farm Bureau, that has fallen to less than 13 cents per dollar. Given total US food spending of about $1.7 trillion each year, that falling share suggests that the changes in the food system could be costing US farmers at least $150 billion a year – certainly many times the $18 billion in federal farm subsidies that were paid to them in 2018. The Nation, February 18, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Farming How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. Ezra Klein, New York Times, December 16, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Farming In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people. It's not just people and plants that have become more productive. In 1950, the average cow yielded 5,300 pounds of milk. In 2016, the average cow yielded 23,000 pounds of milk. A Wisconsin Holstein recently yielded nearly 75,000 pounds of milk in a year, which amounts to roughly 24 gallons a day. Her name is Gigi. You can thank her later. Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk © 2019 Kwiple.com
Farming In 1935, when there were about 127 million Americans, there were six million farms. By 2017 the population had gone up to 325 million, and the number of farms had gone down to two million. Four million had shut down in the space of a single lifetime; many millions of farmers lost their farms. In 1940 the population of Greene County, Iowa, in the center of the Corn Belt, was 16,599. It had fallen to about half that by 2020. Ian Frazier, New York Review of Books, February 9, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Farming Now, what we see, obviously, is economies of scale having happened in America —big get bigger, and small go out. I don't think in America we, for any small business, have a guaranteed income or a guaranteed probability of survival. Sonny Perdue, Secretary of Agriculture, quoted by Bloomberg Businessweek, March 2, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Farming Transcripts show that farm policy hasn't come up even once during a presidential debate for the past 16 years. For more than a hundred years before that, however, the hyperbolic praise of American farmers was a campaign mainstay. A. Hope Jahren, New York Times, November 23, 2016 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Farming We're very independent-minded people here in Maine. We’ll farm in five inches of topsoil on top of granite, and we'll like it. A resident of Damariscotta, Maine, quoted by New York Times, April 18, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
Farming What's the difference between a pigeon and a family farmer? — — — — — A pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere. Old joke © 2017 Kwiple.com