Two million farms is an impressive-sounding number, and it’s regularly invoked to not only thwart proposed pollution limits but also to pass beneficial tax laws and subsidy programs for farmers.
Farmers hold a vaunted status in the founding mythology of the US that persists today, so arguing against or in favor of a given piece of legislation from a position of helping 2 million farms has been an effective talking point for the industry. But there’s just one problem with it: It’s not true.
Around half of America’s farms make little to no money and produce little to no food, but they’re often lumped in with the country’s largest and most polluting farms — a verbal sleight of hand that is rarely questioned and provides political cover for the biggest polluters to continue business as usual.
Posted by MeringueSuccessful33
4 Comments
For the global poor
https://web.archive.org/web/20250905075901/https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/460046/usda-census-two-million-farms
!ping agriculture&rural
> give government handouts to farms
> millions of “farms” appear
who could have predicted
I would guess a large number of these are basically tax evasion vehicles
Wow, talk about a corner of the market
>Meanwhile, just 347 egg farms — the top 0.14 percent, which have 100,000 or more birds — produce 75 percent of the nation’s egg supply.
No wonder prices fluctuate whenever a bird flu strain rips through the egg farms. Just knocking out 35 of those egg farms for a few days will fuck supplies for months.