How did corporations hurt the small farmer and rancher?

Answer 1

Corporations manage on a mass-production scale of producing food for people, be it dairy, beef, or crop production. When they produce on a mass-production scale, they are taking up more and more land as they grow, pushing out the smaller farmer and rancher. Corporations also tend to monopolize a particular market, driving market prices down (prices always increase when there is competition on the market), reducing competition, and subsequently putting the smaller family farms on a precarious position as far as income is concerned. These big corporations also tend to higher cheap labour, often hiring illegal immigrants from places like Mexico.

Corporations have controlled prices to the point where they are able to gain more income than the average farmer. Buying out smaller corporations and companies and merging into others has enabled this monopolization, and subsequently price control on not only market prices for livestock, and crops, but also costs of fertilizers, fuel and feed. Small farmers and ranchers have no choice but to either follow along like marionettes, or quit, or find a niche market to decrease their own costs and increase their profit margins where these big corporations can't.

In the USA, corporations are so big that they can overpower the government itself. Monsanto is a good example of this. A lot of the Senate is people that have worked for Monsanto, and thus are able to be influenced by these big companies to either keep their mouths shut about certain things, or control the USDA's decisions on proper food safety and meat testing, something that the small farms can't get away with, but the bigger corporations can. The NAIS (National Animal Identification System) was actually not proposed by the USDA, but by the big corporations themselves. Then to add to the pain and pressure to the small farmers, these same big companies opted out of the NAIS proposal, instead directing it at the small farmers and ranchers. The NAIS really was another scheme to get more money out of family farms and ranches and push more families to the point of no return so these corporations could control more land.

In Canada, meat packing and distribution is controlled by two main powerhouses: Cargil and XL Foods. These two companies have taken over all of the other federally inspected plants that was started up by local producers, most feedlots, and have subsequently been monopolizing the live cattle market prices. With only two competing companies, there certainly isn't very much competition going on. Like the big agricultural companies in the USA, these two companies in Canada are gaining profits where the small farmers and ranchers are going deeper in the red.