Impacts on rural communities:

Government policies, infrastructural development, corporate pressures, and other factors combined to increasingly consolidate land and agricultural production over the course of the 20th century. During World War I, the US encouraged farmers to produce record yields of crops and livestock in service of the war effort. The continued emphasis on productivity after the war led to a glut and a vicious cycle of low prices, debt, and overproduction. By the 1930s, between decreasing prices and the effects of the Dust Bowl on certain areas of the country, many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In spite of some attempts by the government to reduce overproduction, farmer bankruptcy rates increased steadily until World War II.

During and after World War II, the US government pressured farmers once again to increase yields. At an accelerating rate from the 1940s and 50s onward, the number of farmers decreased while the average farm size increased (see Figure 2). The number of family farmers decreased further from the mid-20th century onward, from 7.6 million in 1950 to 2.06 million in 2000. Increased mechanization over the same period has also led to decreases in the numbers of hired farmworkers, from 2.33 million in 1950 to about half that in 2000.

The aggressive pursuit of surplus and higher yields ramped up even more under President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, who pushed farmers to plant “from fencerow to fencerow” and systematically dismantled government protections for farmers established in the New Deal era. This resulted in the overproduction, collapsing prices, and record debt and foreclosures that characterized the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Farmers have long been one of the most at-risk populations for depression and suicide. During the farm crisis, the suicide rate among farmers peaked at 58 suicides per 100,000 farmers in 1982. Facing continued issues of mounting debt and decades of rural crisis, more than 450 farmers across the Midwest died by suicide from 2014 to 2018. According to 2016 data collected by the National Violent Death Reporting System, the suicide rate among farmers was 43.2 out of 100,000. (For comparison, the average rate for the US population in 2017 was 18 suicides per 100,000 people).

Impacts on the environment:

As of 2018, agriculture directly contributed 10 percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions (amounting to 698 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent). Indirectly, its impact is far greater, through food processing, fertilizer production, and transportation. As estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when factoring in these related industries, global agriculture is responsible for 21-37 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions (see Figure 3).

Worldwide, the expansion and intensification of industrial agriculture is the number one contributor to biodiversity loss. Excessive application of fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorus leads to nutrient pollution and algal blooms that create dead zones in bodies of water — most notably, the Gulf of Mexico. 

Meanwhile, the drinking water of millions of Americans living in or near farming communities across the country is contaminated by dangerous amounts of nitrates and coliform bacteria from fertilizer and manure. And farmworkers — often immigrants — are disproportionately exposed to the hazards of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.