× Expand USDA U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue raised eyebrows after comments he made about small farms at October's World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin.

“In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Perdue said. “I don’t think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.”

Akin to Nixon and Ford’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s 1970s rallying cry for corporate farming which encouraged “fence-row to fence-row” farming, this is what the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue told reporters following a town hall meeting at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin on Tuesday.

Frankly, I’m a little fascinated that the Secretary had the audacity to speak so brazenly in a state that has led the nation in farm bankruptcies for the past two years. Fascinated, but not entirely surprised. I’ve lived in rural Wisconsin long enough to know that there are still plenty of folks here that are also repeating the late Butz’s “get big or get out” mantra some forty years later.

This type of rhetoric continues to have dire consequences for our rural communities. In a 2000 study of 1,106 rural communities, economic growth rates in communities with traditional-sized farms were 55 percent higher than in those with large animal feeding operations. This is because smaller farms make nearly 95 percent of their expenditures locally, while larger operations spend less than 20 percent locally. Having many farms of various sizes has a huge positive impact on the local economy and provides a livelihood for many hardworking people.

It’s not just the farmers who will be out of work if we continue down the path of farm consolidation and corporate-owned farms.

The affable statesman from Georgia joked and charmed his way through the hour-long town hall, often to short bursts of laughter from the crowd of reporters, agribusiness reps, and farmers. The actual substance of his responses was another matter, and I couldn’t help but get the feeling that there was a disconnect between what is happening in farm country and the actions of the man appointed to represent the people of farm country.

Perdue indicated that he recognized the overarching problem in the dairy industry, stating that dairy farms are going out of business, but there hasn’t been a decline in the number of cows. “That’s what happens with oversupply,” he stated. He later added that “when times are good, farmers add cows; when times are bad, farmers add cows.” But when asked by a Barron County Farm Bureau President Karyn Schauf if he would support a flexible and mandatory federal supply management system, he responded, “If you need to know now, the answer’s no.”

What?

Seems to me that if you’re stuck in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging.

Seems to me that if you’re stuck in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Especially when research from two of the nation’s top dairy economists indicates that market impacts of a dairy policy reform that would put the brakes on oversupply would increase average milk price, increase net farm operating income, reduce price volatility, reduce the rate of farm losses, and reduce government (i.e. taxpayer) expenditures. All this adds up to the fact that if supply is managed to better match actual demand, farms won’t have to grow to enormous scales to try to make up for low prices.

In a response to a question about lab-cultured meats, the Secretary responded that “consumers want transparency and to know where their food comes from.” Again, this seems like a reasonable statement, were it not for the absence of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) in the highly-touted USMCA trade agreement. Current policy allows foreign meat to be imported into the United States and bear the label “Product of U.S.A.” as long as it passes through a USDA-inspected plant. Beef producers and other farmers have been pushing to get COOL, but have been thwarted at every turn by agribusiness and inaction by the USDA.

This isn’t the first time our Department of Agriculture has acted against the interests of our farmers. Amid widespread opposition, USDA announced this year that they are moving the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) from the nation’s capital to the Kansas City region. As a result, an estimated 78 percent of ERS employees and 80 percent of NIFA employees have left the agency rather than move.

“The confluence of all these things is a catastrophe for family farmers and ranchers, who will suffer from the loss of the publicly funded agricultural research and evidence-based policies and programs that help them improve productivity, steward natural resources, and access global markets. It will be just as detrimental to consumers, who rely on a knowledgeable and stable agricultural industry for a healthy, safe, and reliable food supply,” National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson stated in a press release earlier this year.

Secretary Perdue also oversaw the elimination of the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration, the agency responsible for enforcement of antitrust law in the meatpacking business, and for protecting farmers and ranchers from predatory and retaliatory trade practices through enforcement of the Packers & Stockyards Act of 1921, shifting their responsibilities to the Agriculture Marketing Service. As AMS has historically served the interests of large agribusiness rather than producers, this is like having the fox guard the henhouse.

If Abraham Lincoln intended the Department of Agriculture to be “precisely the people's Department,” Secretary Perdue is winnowing it down to be precisely the “Department of the people on top.”

At a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. in early September, Wisconsin farmer Bryce Luchterhand told a number of commodity group representatives, “If you have policy that supports big farmers, smaller farmers will fail; if you have policy that supports small farmers, big farmers will do just fine.”

After Perdue’s comments in Madison, I guess we know which path the current administration has chosen.