Day 3: Commodities – Where the Blood Money Flows
A Yes Vote That Spits on the Soil
Before the headlines about SNAP cuts, before the gutted conservation programs, and before the empty promises to rural hospitals, H.R. 1 makes its biggest betrayal in the fine print of its commodity titles. Subtitle C, tucked behind bureaucratic language and yield formulas, is where the money moves. Quietly. Strategically. Violently.
This isn’t the sexy part of the bill. It’s the skeletal structure, the dry, data-laden clauses about “reference prices,” “base acres,” “producer elections,” and “loan rates.” But buried here is the real policy architecture of agricultural inequality in America. This is where they bake the cake before throwing crumbs at the rest of us.
These aren’t reforms. They’re recalibrations of power. They are deliberate surgical moves that push more wealth, land, and control toward the already powerful: vertically integrated corporations, large scale commodity operations, and land barons with historic ties to USDA funding. This is the part of the bill that ensures working-class and BIPOC farmers stay stuck in a system they were never allowed to fully enter, while agribusiness giants get to write their own future.
Sections like 10301 (reference prices), 10304 (Price Loss Coverage), and 10305 (Agriculture Risk Coverage) weren’t written with a small tomato grower in Henderson, Rowan, and Buncombe counties in mind. They weren’t meant to help a fourth generation Black sweet potato farmer in Johnston County reclaim land or compete in a rigged marketplace. These sections, especially 10302, the base acre expansion clause are about locking in supremacy, not sharing opportunity.
So if your farm doesn’t stretch over a thousand acres… if your tractor came from an auction lot, not a tax write-off... if your land is rented, your insurance spotty, and your family name wasn’t carved into USDA files three generations ago then guess what?
This part of the Farm Bill ain’t for you.
But it damn sure affects you. It decides who gets a cushion when prices collapse. Who gets to weather a drought without bankruptcy. Who gets invited to the table and who gets buried underneath the damn thing..
So, we’re going line by line, not because it’s fun, but because if you want to understand the theft, you have to look at the tools they used to pull it off.
Commodity policy is the scalpel of corporate agriculture. H.R. 1 is designed to be one long, deep incision.
This is called relief. It is branded as protection. But for most of us, the working class, the people working the fields, the families surviving out here in rural North Carolina, what we got was peanuts, and not the good kind. The big money, the policy levers, the tax breaks and risk protections, those were reserved for the vertically integrated giants who already control most of the land, pricing, and supply chains. We are not the intended beneficiaries of this bill. We are the bait.
On July 3, H.R. 1 passed the U.S. House by a razor-thin 218-214 margin. Within 24 hours, it was signed by Donald Trump. The bill was praised as a lifeline to farmers and ranchers, a victory for agriculture. But look beyond the headlines, and it becomes clear this bill is not for the 80% of North Carolina farms that are classified as small. It's not for the young farmers fighting for access to land, the Black growers boxed out of generational wealth, or the tenant producers raising livestock they don’t even own. This was a bill written with Cargill and Smithfield in mind. This was a bill that locks in a future where market share means survival, and everybody else becomes expendable.
"We're in the worst hunger crisis North Carolina has seen in nearly 20 years," warned Jason Kanawati Stephani of the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC.
At the very same time that millions face food insecurity, Trump’s signature legislation gutted SNAP by over $230 billion, shifting costs onto already strained states and placing 40 million Americans at greater risk of hunger. That includes tens of thousands of rural families, veterans, and farm workers the very people this bill claimed to protect. Ted Budd voted yes. It just goes to show, you can live on a farm and still vote to bury one. Ted Budd did.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that he did. Budd has never been a champion for working-class farmers, no matter how many times he poses next to a tractor. His record is a case study in performative ag populism masking corporate allegiance. His family’s business was entangled with AgriBioTech, a now defunct seed company that collapsed in scandal, costing farmers across 39 states millions and leaving a massive tax debt behind in North Carolina. That was the opening chapter.
Since then, Budd has built a career voting against the very programs that hold rural infrastructure together. He voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. Against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. He voted against expanded broadband, rural hospital funding, and the 2018 Farm Bill.
But when it came time to vote on a bill that offered huge gains for commodity powerhouses, locked in vertically integrated livestock contracts, and offered next to nothing for diversified farms, tenant producers, or beginning farmers? He said hell yes, that’s what I am voting for!
Why did he vote yes on a bill that gives vertically integrated agribusiness even more control over prices, land, and risk management tools? Because that’s who this bill was designed for. This wasn’t a Farm Bill for everyone. It was an ag extraction package for the top 10%.
Groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, and the Soybean and Corn Growers lined up to sing its praises. And sure, there are things in the bill that benefit someone. Increased reference prices. Estate tax protections. Equipment depreciation. But the real question is: which farmers? Who has the land and assets and inheritance to benefit? Who's big enough to take advantage of the changes to PLC and ARC payments?
Because it's not the people growing for local markets. It's not the regenerative ag folks working 10 acres in Sampson County. It's not the poultry farmer stuck in a predatory contract or the Black grower shut out of USDA loans for a generation. It's not the Indigenous seed keeper whose land was never returned.
This bill rewards scale, status, and consolidation. It strips down the safety nets for working families to expand the golden parachutes for monopolistic ag giants.
It was branded as bipartisan relief for all of rural America. What it really is, is a betrayal. Ted Budd voted yes and that vote spit on the soil he claims to defend.
I learned something while researching this over the past few days. Raising animals on your own land doesn’t mean you own the product, or the power.
Take Chad Herring, the third-generation hog farmer out in Mount Olive. His family’s been in the game for decades. The pigs? Not theirs. The feed? Not theirs. The profit? Not really theirs either. Herring Pork Producers is a contract grower for Smithfield Foods, which means they house, feed, and care for tens of thousands of pigs, but Smithfield owns his herd, writes the rules, and takes the check.
That’s not farming. That’s vertical integration with a friendly face. Chad is exactly the kind of person rural PR machines love: dedicated, passionate, hands-on, involved in 4-H and education. He’s good for the brand. But the truth behind the tours and testimonials is this: corporate ag depends on contract growers who carry the risk and labor while ownership stays concentrated up the chain. This is livestock sharecropping, rebranded, that Ted Budd and Brad Knott voted for.
Instead of confronting the monopolies hollowing out rural ownership, They backed a bill that cements corporate control. They had every chance to support antitrust reforms or subsidy caps. Instead, they co-signed an economic chokehold disguised as commodity relief. Budd’s brand says farmer but his votes say China who now owns Smithfield farms
Let’s talk peanuts, because this bill hands them out by the truckload to the right people. Funny how something so salty and sweet can bring back such bitter memories. When I was about four years old, before I understood what rent meant or why the hallway lights flickered in the motels we stayed in, I knew the sound of zippers being yanked closed in the dark.
Knew how to carry a plastic grocery bag full of clothes without dragging it on the carpet. Knew that when my mom’s voice told me to make sure I was quiet and walk fast, it meant we were checking out again, not in the morning, because to a four year old 3 am is not the morning. But my mom would say it had to be before anyone noticed.
Long before I knew what a price floor was or how commodity subsidies carved up the South, I knew what my family called the Mr. Peanut factory in Suffolk. My mom was pregnant. My brother and I were just old enough to understand the rules of skipping out on the rent but not why we had to. It was always my dad, driving us through Hampton Roads in a car full of clothes and questions and bags full of Extra Large Planters Virginia Peanuts, the good kind.
Mr. Peanut stood out like a cartoon god. I couldn’t tell you the exit number, but I remember the way it loomed, distinguished, grinning, polished like money. I’d never seen anything like it. There was something almost holy about it to me, something so big, so out of place, like it didn’t care that the world around it was cracked and running.
My little legs would bounce in the back seat whenever we passed by. “The peanut man! The peanut man!” I’d yell, not knowing anything yet about planters or commodities or monoculture or hunger. Just joy. Just a moment that stuck.
All these years later, writing about peanut subsidies and the price per ton in H.R. 1, I couldn’t stop thinking about that peanut factory. I Couldn’t stop remembering that weird little burst of happiness amid all the instability. I asked my dad, my real dad, not by blood but by everything that matters, why it was hitting me so hard. Why my mind kept pulling me back there, to peanuts and motels with vending machines that would steal my quarters.
He got quiet, the way people do when the memory is warm but the story is hard. He told me about Uncle Terry, his uncle, from his side of the family, but it never mattered what side, because this was the only family I’d ever known. Uncle Terry had lived in those parts, worked with peanuts, knew that land in a way that only folks tied to it by sweat and grief and history can. When he couldn’t farm anymore and was forced to sell off his land, he worked there in the factory. He died in a house fire, my dad told me. Gone just like that. But that’s a story for another time. Another ache that I didn’t know I have and haven’t figured out how to write down yet. Right now, I’m just sitting with the peanuts.
Sitting with the fact that the same crop that made me smile as a barefoot kid clutching a half-empty glass RC bottle is now part of a billion dollar commodity shuffle that leaves families like mine behind. Sitting with the taste of roasted peanuts in a sticky back seat and wondering how something that small could carry so much weight.
So reading about commodities left me digging through all the layers that capitalism paved over. Trying to remember what it felt like before I knew that joy could be weaponized in a PR campaign. That a smiling mascot can be for systems that grind people down and still sell peanuts at a markup. Right now, I’m writing about the peanuts. The ones we remember, and the ones this bill was written for.
Because after I got off the phone with my dad, after he told me about Uncle Terry and the fields and the fire, I kept thinking about that backseat. I was four. The road was dark. The air tasted like sweat, laundry, and Planters.
My brother asleep beside me. My mom breathing heavily up front. We were always on the move, another motel, another exit, another reason not to look back. Somehow, all these years later, I’m back in it. Except now I’ve got the numbers. Now I can see who actually eats at this table and who just shells the nuts.
Under the bill, Price Loss Coverage payments get a major boost. Peanuts jump from $535 a ton to $630 a ton—a 17.8% hike. The marketing loan rate rises to $390 in 2026. Payment limits expand from $125,000 to $155,000, with a special carveout just for those damn peanuts.
Who benefits? Growers who can scale production and have base acres to burn. Not the seventy percent of North Carolina small farms pulling in under ten thousand dollars a year. Not families like mine. Not the folks still driving dark roads with the windows cracked and the gas light on.
This was no accident. Peanut lobbyists fought off the Grassley amendment, which aimed to rein in these bloated subsidies. And they won. The U.S. Peanut Federation, the ASA, and the Southern Peanut Farmers Federation all lined up to claim credit.
But again, who the hell can actually take advantage of these changes? Certainly not urban ag projects. Not diversified produce farms. Not first generation farmers with no planting history. Not contract growers like Herring who don’t even own what they raise.
What H.R. 1 does is concentrate aid in the hands of those who already dominate the market. That’s not relief. That’s entrenchment. And it's what happens when the USDA, commodity groups, and rural state Republicans all sing from the same hymn book written by Bayer and Cargill.
Let’s tally the tab. Sixty six billion for commodity support. Thirty million new base acres added, mostly to the benefit of existing large operators. Crop insurance padding increased. ARC and PLC programs supercharged with new payment ranges and reference prices.
Meanwhile, SNAP gets slashed by nearly one hundred eighty-six billion. Conservation programs get gutted by nearly two billion. Food banks are warning of empty shelves. Small farm programs? Barely mentioned.
Even farmdoc daily, in its dry, data-rich tone, couldn’t ignore it. Rice, seed cotton, and peanuts got the biggest PLC windfalls, up to four hundred percent. People like Ted Budd call this a win for rural North Carolina. I call it a fucking scam. A lobbyist’s dream draped in coveralls.
One more so-called “win” to dissect: the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit. Industry voices like ASA, POET, and NOPA love it. Why wouldn’t they? It explicitly excludes foreign inputs like used cooking oil and tallow, inputs that don’t require fresh land to be cleared, don’t incentivize expansion, and don’t create new emissions. But the GOP doesn’t want recycled solutions, they want refined profits, like the benefits for domestic soy based biofuels, which again helps the already powerful.
The result? A cozy windfall for multibillion-dollar crush facilities that have already built out more than six billion in capacity since 2021. This damn sure isn’t about fuel independence. It’s a consolidation subsidy. It’s a win for ADM and Cargill, not the farmer still trying to afford diesel and a replacement part for their 20 year old tractor.
They named it the Clean Fuel Production Credit, Section 45Z of H.R. 1. Sounds noble, right? Like something that might help rural counties breathe cleaner air, invest in renewables, or reward farmers transitioning to sustainable practices. But peel back the green label, and what you’ll find is the same old rot: a billion-dollar backdoor deal for agribusiness monopolies, wrapped in the language of climate justice.
ADM, Cargill, and the rest of the soy crush mafia are drooling over this fucking thing and why wouldn’t they be? It’s a tailor-made corporate payout, incentivizing them to double down on monoculture, squeeze out smaller producers, and consolidate more control over our food and fuel systems. This isn’t just a credit. It’s a government sponsored land grab dressed in the garb of clean energy.
This 45Z credit rewards scale, not stewardship. It prioritizes domestic feedstocks like soy oil, which means small diversified farms that grow for local markets or rotate crops with care get left in the dust. Then there’s the real poison pill: the removal of the Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) penalty. That penalty existed for a reason. When you ramp up demand for soy oil, you don’t just grow soy, you shift entire global agricultural patterns, push deforestation, displace food crops, and jack up prices. Without ILUC penalties, there’s no disincentive to burn the Amazon or level more of eastern North Carolina’s pine forest buffer zones to make way for fields and industrialized crush facilities.
The result? A credit that pretends to lower emissions while driving up global land degradation, corporate consolidation, and environmental destruction.
Since 2021, over $6 billion in new soy crush capacity has been added. Not in the hands of local cooperatives or county-level ag startups, but in massive plants built by the giants. 45Z ensures that buildout wasn’t a risk, it was a guaranteed profit margin from taxpayer subsidies. All under the illusion of clean energy.
Meanwhile, seventy percent of North Carolina farms make under $10,000 annually. You think they’re building biodiesel refineries or signing tax equity deals with hedge funds? No. They’re hustling to keep up with input costs, fighting off land speculators, and watching their neighbors get priced out of family land that’s been held for generations.
This isn’t innovation. This is green imperialism, a system where rural communities are mined for labor, land, and votes, then tossed aside so multinational corporations can stamp sustainable on another export commodity.
Like I said. It is a fucking scam. A slick, lobbyist written, ethanol-era sequel to the same story we’ve always been told; that if we just give a little more, sacrifice a little longer, and trust the market, our day will come.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but It won’t. Not with 45Z. Not with this Congress. It sure as hell will not with a bill that defines corporate consolidation as progress.
So next time one of these beltway bootlickers tells you this was a win for the environment, ask them where they were when the soy dust rolled in, the hog lagoons overflowed, and the last produce stand on the county line shut down for good. Then tell them to plant that in their precision farmed monocrop and see what the hell grows.
The next section we need to talk in more detail about is called base acre expansion. Sounds harmless, like it’s about giving more farmers a chance. But here’s the truth, H.R. 1 buries equity under 30 million acres of bullshit and not the kind that helps enrich the soil. H.R. 1 adds 30 million new base acres in a way that turbocharges inequality and cements the USDA’s long history of agricultural apartheid. This is not reform. This is consolidation by design, disguised as expanding access.
Let’s back up and define what the hell any of this even means. I will admit I am no expert so if someone reads this and sees that my understanding of this is completely wrong then please let me know.
Base acres are the foundation of commodity subsidy programs like ARC (Agriculture Risk Coverage) and PLC (Price Loss Coverage). They aren’t based on what a farmer grows now, they’re based on what was grown decades ago. Which means your eligibility for federal support is tied to past planting history, a history that deliberately excluded Black farmers, Indigenous land stewards, Latino growers, and pretty much anyone without generational land or USDA credit access. Which not so shockingly is rich white landowners.
So when H.R. 1 says it’s “expanding base acres,” what it really means is giving more subsidy runway to the people who already had the jet. This bill doesn’t fix the system, it scales up the imbalance. It doesn’t unlock opportunity for new or small farmers, it triples down on legacy control and writes another fat check to the largest operators in the game.
If you didn’t benefit from the old base acre system, you’re SURE AS HELL not benefitting from the new one either.
You’re not getting new acres if you’re raising goats on five acres outside Yanceyville. You’re not getting subsidies if you’re a small grower running a CSA near Goldsboro. You’re damn sure not getting a dime if you’re a Black farmer who never got access to USDA loans in the first place. Because this isn’t about fairness. It’s about codifying power.
Thirty million new acres, dropped into a structure that already rewards monoculture, scale, and proximity to D.C. lobbyists. That’s what this is. A gift to Big Ag wrapped in the language of productivity. And the smaller the farm, the more likely you are to get screwed. Because ARC/PLC payments aren’t just based on acreage—they’re based on what the USDA thinks you’re worth, and the smaller you are, the less you count.
According to USDA’s own 2022 data, farms with over 2,000 acres got more than 70% of all commodity subsidies. Meanwhile, farms under 100 acres, like the kind run by many BIPOC growers, beginning farmers, small rural farmers and specialty producers got less than 2%. Now ask yourself who the hell benefits when 30 million more acres get dropped into that same pipeline without structural reform.
Not the guy growing collards on a small farm.
Not the Lumbee family trying to rebuild farmland after generations of dispossession in Robeson. It damn sure isn’t a first-gen Hmong or Black farmer grossing $18K! They still get denied for not having base acres or not being “actively engaged.”
No, the winners are the same ones they’ve always been, which is the trade association backed barons who already turned North Carolina’s Black Belt into a hogshit monoculture. It is a fifth-generation corn baron pulling $899K in profit that keeps the cash flowing. Don’t let anyone tell you this was an accident. This is structural. This is systemic.
USDA policy has always been rigged for those who had land, cash flow, and a seat at the FSA office. It’s not broken. It was built this way. This shit is working exactly like it is supposed to. Expanding base acres without fixing the racist, classist, and exclusionary foundation doesn’t level the playing field, it bulldozes the bleachers and builds a damn VIP box.
In Pigford v. Glickman, filed in 1997, thousands of Black farmers sued the USDA for decades of racial discrimination in how it administered farm loans, subsidies, and technical assistance. The lawsuit alleged that USDA offices across the South routinely denied Black farmers access to credit and emergency aid that white farmers received as a matter of course. The 1999 settlement which is known as the largest civil rights class action suit in U.S. history, acknowledged this injustice. It created a two tiered claim system that offered $50,000 to those who could meet basic proof requirements and a more complex route for higher compensation. Even with that judicial win on paper, many Black farmers still face hurdles, delays, and denials.
The fact that In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation had to be filed years later to address leftover claims only proves how deeply broken the process remained. The legacy of Pigford is not just a footnote, it’s the living, bleeding context for every new farm bill that pretends race doesn't shape land, power, and policy. When this 119th Congress expands payment limits and base acre eligibility without addressing who historically got excluded, they are not correcting the past, they are doubling down on it.
So the next time a Republican or hell let’s be fair, even a corporate funded Democrat, tells you this section of H.R. 1 was about modernizing ag policy, ask them if they’ve ever walked through a 15-acre sweet corn potato plot in July without crop insurance, without subsidies, without a co-op to sell through. Ask them if they know what it’s like to lose land to tax foreclosure because your family never got access to a USDA loan, but your neighbor did, every year, like clockwork. H.R. 1 doesn’t fix any of this shit. It feeds and engorges it.
This section was never meant to be easy reading. Commodity policy is boring by design. It is dense, technical, guarded by acronyms and yield formulas and eligibility charts that hide the power plays underneath. It’s slow violence with a corporate take over of your local farms. Buried in this dry code is the real machinery of rural survival and ruin. That’s why I read it. That’s why I write it.
I honestly didn’t plan to take this long with commodities. Life, like policy, doesn’t always wait on our timelines. I thought I’d knock this out in two days, give folks a deep dive into what H.R. 1 does to agriculture, but the deeper I dug into the soil of this section, the more it demanded to be unpacked.
If you made it this far, I hope you’ve seen the pattern. The money flows where the acreage already sits. The power stays with the people who already own the land, the contracts, and the leverage. What we’re watching isn’t reform. It’s reinforcement. A system doubling down on its own imbalance.
Tomorrow or maybe the next day, depending on the chaos or calm of an actual poor working class writer who has lived this shit, either way, I will keep going. I will describe the sweetheart crop insurance handouts, and discuss more about the gutting of conservation. I will also lay out how rural equity was quietly erased while lobbyists got everything they wanted in this bill. I’ll show you how the flooding in areas that have never experienced it and the heat waves are more than weather, they're policy consequences.
But for now, if any part of this long, heavy breakdown made your jaw tighten, your eyes widen, or your eyebrows raise in surprise, if even one section made you go, “Damn, I didn’t know that!’’ then you’re exactly who I wrote it for. If you’re the kind of person who actually finds all this commodity clause reading weirdly... exciting? Well, I’ve got a whole damn list of links and PDFs I’d be happy to share. Just don’t blame me when your eyes start crossing at reference price escalator formulas. Until then, rest, reflect, and get ready. The peanut man ain’t done talking yet.