Day 4: Commodities — Legacy Pays, the Rest Wait
The False Promise of Protection - part 2 of Commodities
Right-wing media outlets are pitching it as a safety net.
Politicians will be posing with tractors and in wheat fields.
Lobbyist groups are saying H.R. 1 will stabilize agriculture, help rural families, and ensure a strong American future.
The reality is that this bill stabilizes only one thing, the past. It protects wealth, not farmers. It extends a helping hand only to those who’ve already had a seat at the table for decades.
Subtitle C of H.R. 1, the commodity title, is the part lawmakers brag about when they say, “we’re helping the heartland.” But what it really does is write federal farm policy like a land deed from the 1980s. This is rewarding scale, punishing struggle, and erasing anyone without old paperwork or inherited acreage.
This section of the bill isn’t a safety net. It’s a velvet rope. It lets the biggest players stroll through the system with guaranteed checks, while smallholder farmers, tenant growers, Black landowners, and working class families are kept outside, waiting, qualifying, reapplying, and often, just disappearing. The rich get richer, the land gets locked, and the people doing the hardest work are pushed even further to the margins.
In Johnston County, we’re living proof of how this plays out. We’ve got absentee landowners cashing checks for crops they don’t plant. We’ve got legacy base acres that reward speculation, not production. We’ve got working families leasing land from LLCs who’ve never touched a plow.
This isn’t equity. It’s a legal architecture for exclusion. If you came here hoping for wins, for small farmers, for climate resilience, for community revival, buckle up. There are a few crumbs, and there are headlines worth cheering. Peek behind the curtain and you will see that Subtitle C is a fortress with the gates closed to most of us.
SECTION 10304 – PRICE LOSS COVERAGE - PLC and the Politics of Exclusion
This section is a golden parachute for legacy acreage holders. It jacks up reference prices across commodities, especially peanuts, rice, and cotton, guaranteeing larger payouts anytime market prices dip. That’s not safety. That’s welfare for agribusiness.
This isn’t any damn relief for farmers. This is the USDA writing monthly love letters to old money landowners and calling it a goddamn policy.
The whole damn thing hinges on base acres, those frozen, bureaucratically calcified acre counts tied to what got planted back in the early 2000s. Doesn’t matter what you’re planting now. Doesn’t matter what land you cleared, what crops you diversified into, how many hailstorms or hurricanes you survived. If you weren’t in the system when George W. Bush was still pretending to read “The Pet Goat,” you’re just a ghost to this policy.
H.R. 1 jacks up the reference prices, sure. They’ll quote you $16.90 for long-grain rice, $10 for soybeans, and $630/ton for peanuts like it’s manna from heaven. USA Rice practically wet themselves in gratitude. “We cannot thank President Trump enough,” their CEO slobbered after the bill passed. They called it a cornerstone of the safety net. A generational win. A proud moment for hope and resilience.
Bullshit.
Let me tell you what it really is. It’s backpay for the well connected. If your acreage got locked in during the Bush years, if you were already on the inside, this bill rewards you with fat ass checks anytime market prices slip. You don’t have to prove hardship. You don’t even have to plant the damn crop. Just sit on the acreage, show the paperwork, and wait for the check.
You know who doesn’t get that check? Christine and her husband in Benson, working full time jobs while trying to keep four generations of family land from being swallowed by developers and dust. They’re out here doing school tours, vendor events and u-pick sweet potatoes to survive, while the USDA pipeline is jammed with subsidy dollars going to absentee landlords who haven’t picked up a shovel since Reagan.
You don’t get Price Loss Coverage without base acres. and you don’t get base acres unless you already had them, or you win one hell of a bureaucratic lottery. Section 10302 pretends to expand access. Says there’s 30 million new base acres up for grabs. You know what that looks like on paper? A miracle. You know what it looks like in practice? Red tape, eligibility traps, and a paper trail most working farmers can’t even begin to reconstruct.
You need a five-year planting history from 2019–2023, documentation of excess acres planted relative to what’s on USDA record, and all your i’s dotted with bureaucrats who don’t return phone calls unless you’ve got a lobbyist on speed dial.
You’re leasing ten acres from your cousin to try your hand at heirloom corn? Too bad. You diversified into produce in 2021 to survive pandemic supply chain collapses? Disqualified. You’re a new Black landowner trying to reclaim stolen ground? Good luck getting the FSA officer to even spell your damn name right, much less count your acreage correctly.
This is spreadsheet eugenics. It’s the federal government deciding who gets to be a farmer by looking at who already was. It’s structurally rigged to reward stasis and penalize change, because change scares the hell out of the people cashing in on the way things are.
Right wing publications are championing that this bill raised the reference prices, like that’s some grand favor. Like 113% of 2025 levels is supposed to carry you through diesel inflation, fertilizer spikes, and a heatwave every other damn month. Fertilizer costs haven’t just gone up, they’ve exploded. Since 2020, prices for critical inputs like anhydrous ammonia and potash have more than doubled, in some cases tripled. We're talking 150%, 200%, even 210% spikes depending on the type, and no, that’s not cherry picked worst case. That’s the damn average.
So when politicians slap a new price floor on the table and call it protection, don’t be fooled. These aren’t safety nets. They’re signage, something shiny you can stick on a campaign flyer and shove in the next Trump rally swag bag. They exist to make it look like something is being done while farmers are getting gouged to hell and back.
These price floors don’t touch the root problem, global supply shocks, energy inflation, war induced fertilizer bans, or corporate consolidation. But they do make for great talking points on Breitbart News. That’s the scam. Policy that sounds like protection, feels like betrayal, and delivers exactly jack shit to the folks getting crushed at the co-op.
Here is the part you won’t hear a Sirius XM Patriot channel pundit rant about, starting in 2031, those reference prices grow by just 0.5% a year. That’s not inflation adjusted. That’s austerity, pre-programmed. That’s the same shell game Republicans run on Social Security, pretend it’s indexed, then starve it on the back end.
This is where USA Rice shows their hand. They call it wins for rice. I call it a tight wound trampoline. If you’re already standing on the platform, 5000 acres, combine the size of a tank, lawyers on retainer, you bounce even higher. But if you’re down below? No ladder. No invitation. Just dry dirt in your mouth and the sound of subsidy checks hitting someone else’s mailbox.
This whole section is a monument to what we’ve always known, policy isn’t written for farmers. It’s written for landowners. For every sweet potato grower with a dream and a leased plot in Wilson County, there’s a rice baron in Arkansas getting paid to not plant, again. That’s what they call victory. That’s the hope they cheer for.
Well, I’ve got hope too but it ain’t in this scam bill. It’s in the people still working 80-hour weeks trying to make land work despite this bullshit. It’s in the families who host pick-your-own days just to cover their electric bill. It’s in the small town growers who never had a lobbyist but still show up to the market with callused hands and a prayer.
It sure as hell ain’t in this lie of a policy that celebrates the past while shutting out the future. This is privatized profit, socialized risk, and it cements the wealth divide, rewarding scale, punishing new entrants. In a county like Johnston, where development is eating up farmland and small operations are fighting just to hang on, this isn’t support. It’s a slap in the face.
SECTION 10305 – AGRICULTURE RISK COVERAGE (ARC) - Risk Management for Those Who Can Afford to Lose
If PLC is the velvet rope, ARC is the fancier lounge in the back, accessible only if you’re already on the list. It’s not about protecting farmers. It’s about protecting spreadsheets. About rewarding scale with blanket subsidies masked as risk coverage.
ARC takes your last several years of revenue, averages them out, then steps in with a payday if your margin dips below that historical mark. Sounds reasonable until you see who qualifies, or, better yet, who doesn’t.
ARC tweaks increase those revenue guarantees. The fat cats love it. Because farming on a massive scale means your spreadsheet never really goes red. You absorb swings, hedge with futures, harvest with contractors, and let the government bail you out when needed. Meanwhile, the small farm? If you leased land, if you got hammered by a freak hailstorm, if you planted a niche crop, you’re fucked. You're invisible to ARC.
Suddenly, farm policy sounds like arithmetic designed to keep consolidation in place. If ARC is insurance, it's only good if you're already insured by wealth. This isn’t about risk management, it’s about risk privilege. The real tweak is structural, it is about protecting consolidation while pretending it’s policy.
Back when the bill was farmed out on Capitol Hill, pork barrel promises were spritzed across press releases. Senators gushed that ARC was retooled to help farmers with tighter margins, to cushion weather shocks, and bolster small operations.
Reality? It's the same script rewritten. It’s still locked behind historical acreage, and eligibility remains tethered to base acres and multi-year records, exactly the same damn criteria small, BIPOC, and beginning farmers can’t meet.
As always, the policy makes sense on paper, but policy isn’t for the powerless. Under capitalism, it's always for the rich as fuck folks. ARC now guarantees that mega-ops never bleed. The rest settle for scraps when there isn’t a damn thing but gristle left on the bone.
Farmers suffering from the same storms, inflation, and labor crises as their large scale neighbors are still left out. This isn’t about supporting farms. It’s about subsidizing consolidation and making sure that the public dollar stays in elite agricultural portfolios.
SECTION 10306 & 10307 – EQUITABLE TREATMENT OF CERTAIN ENTITIES AND PAYMENT LIMITATIONS - THE SHELL GAME SUBSIDY
This is the part of the bill where they stop pretending. Equity becomes a fuck-you, that’s why joke and corporate welfare hides behind a fair sounding LLC. It is called equitable treatment of pass through entities. This sounds like reform, but it’s code for loosening restrictions so more partnerships, LLCs, and shell companies can soak up subsidies. Not equity, loophole expansion. It lets millionaires split their farm interests across family members and corporations to dodge payment caps.
You know what this bullshit means? It means if you’ve got a cousin that you get your lawyer to register a tax ID for them and they have a damn pulse, you’ve got yourself another subsidy check. If your lawyer files it right, that’s three more. H.R. 1 weaponizes legal paperwork. It turns family farms into nesting dolls of shell corporations. You don’t need to farm. You just need to file.
Before, there were caps. A person, meaning a human, could get $125,000 in payments. That still had loopholes wide enough to drive a John Deere through. But now? Now, a qualified pass-through entity counts just like a person. LLCs. Partnerships. S-corps. Trusts. Joint ventures. All of them get to stand in line with their hand out—and they can stand there all at once. No North Carolina tenant farmer ever hit a $125K cap. But every agribiz empire is already drooling. You could call it creative accounting. I call it fraud in clean Carhartt coveralls.
Not one single family scratching out a living on 20 leased acres is hitting the $125K ceiling, let alone the $155K cap this bill just locked in. But you know who the hell is? The folks who bought Duplin County, broke it into shell companies, and called it family. Duplin County isn’t just known for muscadine wine. It's ground zero for one of the most aggressive corporate land consolidations in the South. The same handful of agribusiness giants have snapped up huge swaths of land here, often under the names of family farms that are anything but. These aren't cousins and uncles passing down tractors, they’re shell LLCs, contract grower networks, and vertically integrated power plays controlled by the pork industry. Smithfield. Murphy-Brown.
The suits in Raleigh like Larry Strickland, who likes to call himself a farmer, call it efficiency. Locals call it survival, if they’re lucky. What used to be diversified family owned land now stinks, literally and politically, of corporate control and the toxic sludge of environmental injustice.
Congress can’t shut the hell up about TikTok, claiming it’s a threat to national security because some teenager in Iowa might be dancing for the Chinese government. But here’s what you don’t hear a damn thing about; the largest pork producer in America, Smithfield Foods is literally owned by China. Bought out in 2013 by WH Group, a massive Chinese conglomerate, Smithfield controls everything from the hog barns in Johnston County to the bacon on your breakfast plate.
So let me get this shit straight, a Chinese state influenced corporation can own millions of acres of American farmland, control huge swaths of our food supply, pump waste into our rivers, and exploit contract growers across the South, and that’s somehow less concerning than a goddamn lip-syncing app?
Spare me the fake ass patriotism. If Congress gave a damn about sovereignty, they’d be investigating Smithfield’s landholdings and labor practices, not chasing viral trends. But the pork lobby donates, and TikTok doesn’t. This isn’t equity. It’s a goddamn subsidy laundering operation.
Of course they indexed the new $155K cap to inflation. Because when poor people ask for SNAP to rise with inflation, it’s a burden. But when agribusinesses need more cash to buy a new 100K GMC Denali truck with heated seats and satellite guidance, suddenly inflation indexing becomes common sense. These aren’t accidents. This is structure. This is policy engineering for the rich.
The people who wrote this bill didn’t just hand cash to the wealthy, they built a financial slip-and-slide straight from the USDA to the bank accounts of corporate ag, and they did this shit while cutting climate funding, gutting SNAP, and shrugging off housing costs so high that farmworkers are living in vans parked behind churches.
While we’re here, let’s talk about how they sweetened the pot in Section 10307. They didn’t just open the loopholes, they made sure the hole stayed wide forever. That $155,000 cap? It grows with inflation now. That means next year, and the year after, and the year after that, the check gets bigger. You think a small family farm growing collards and strawberries to sell at the farmers market on weekends with a second job at Food Lion gets to ride that escalator? Hell no. That escalator doesn’t have a stop at that damn floor.
I have talked to real farmers while writing this. I've heard their voice tremble over USDA forms they can’t afford to file wrong. I’ve seen the notices come in the mail, denied, delayed, disqualified. Not because they don’t grow food. Not because they don’t matter. But because they don’t have a CPA on speed dial and a shell company in their sister’s name.
Ask Jim Wiesner if this system was built for him. Jim Wiesner’s family has farmed this land for over 85 years. They run 6th Generation Farm, a working farm with pumpkins, sheep’s wool, produce, “bottle babies” you can meet on weekends. The kind of operation that still trusts customers with a self-serve farm stand and five dollar eggs on the honor system.
Jim’s not just a farmer. He’s a former mayor of Micro, a public servant, and one of the last people in Johnston County still fighting against the slow, quiet suffocation of rural life. He’s fighting against erasure, not metaphorical, not symbolic, but literal. Against a future where 85 years of family farming gets erased from the internet If you look up the farm's address, you might not find a working farm. You’ll find a subdivision listing. Same address. Same coordinates.
That’s how erasure works now. You don’t have to bulldoze the barn. You just overwrite the metadata. One developer reuses your address, and suddenly your life’s work gets redirected to a sales office you never built. You’re still out there feeding bottle babies, but online, your farm's already paved over.
“Our address was used for another on Strickland Road,” Jim told me. “Our customers thought we went out of business because the internet says 6th Generation is a subdivision now. It’s still affecting us.”
Jim’s never gotten USDA infrastructure money. Not for the old well. Not for broadband that cuts out daily. Not for sewer lines that stop at his driveway.
“The only internet we have is Brightspeed and it works sometimes and sometimes it don’t,” he continued, “At the end of the drive there is fiber optic but too costly to service us. “Our water comes from a 25-year-old well and we are on septic tank. At the end of the driveway there is county water and sewer, but it doesn’t connect to us.”
In June 2022, after a catastrophic water treatment failure triggered a county-wide water shortage, Jim warned Spectrum News that infrastructure was cracking under the weight of unchecked development:
“We have irrigation wells on our farm. They are completely dry... You look at the riverbank—you can see it’s down two or three feet.”
( Watch the Spectrum News segment here)
Jim isn’t forming shell companies. He’s not filing subsidies under a dozen names. He’s not riding the train of fake equity this bill hands out like candy. He’s just farming and losing customers to Google. All while watching ash fall from the developer burn piles onto his vehicles forcing his mother-in-law to stay inside because she is on an oxygen tank.
“It’s hard to breathe with all the smoke and ashes on Strickland Road,” he posted in 2022. “Ashes are landing on top of our cars. And my mother-in-law is on oxygen.”
H.R. 1 doesn’t just ignore folks like Jim. It steps over them, climbs up their damn backs, and passes the check to someone already fucking rich enough to never need it.
Section 10308 – AGI Limit Hike: Welfare for the Wealthy, a Guillotine for the Rest
This section is brass knuckles to the working poor. H.R. 1, in its sweaty, swaggering devotion to the already rich, raises the Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) cap for subsidy eligibility from $900,000 to $1.25 million. Not loans. Not cost share incentives. Straight up checks from the federal government.. Let that sink in: a person or entity making over a million fucking dollars a year can now still qualify for farm subsidy payments.
This is wealth welfare, plain and brutal. It’s the government saying, “Don’t worry, millionaire land baron, we’ve got your back,” while slashing SNAP for struggling families in every county throughout North Carolina. This change isn’t about helping farmers. It’s about helping investors who bought up farmland to diversify their portfolios and want Uncle Sam to guarantee their returns. Here’s the truth, if you make over a million dollars a year, you don’t need a fucking farm subsidy. You most likely need a damn tax audit.
Have you ever tried to run a farm on a W-2 and a prayer? Have you ever had to beg the FSA office to process your application before the crop died in the field? Christine Livingston has. Her husband inherited land in Benson that used to stretch 6,000 acres, now it’s hemmed in by cul-de-sacs, dollar stores, and neighbors turning the dirt for Instagram. They lease what they can’t plant. He runs HVAC. She clocks in at Hobby Lobby and still finds time to host vendor events and BBQ days to make the numbers work. You think they see a dime of this new AGI threshold money?
Hell no. They don’t even qualify under the old rules. Because sweat equity doesn’t print out as profit on a Schedule F. Because if your AGI doesn’t fit the spreadsheet, you disappear, even if you’re doing all the work that keeps this whole damn rural experiment from falling into dust.
The small farmers in Johnston County aren’t the ones benefiting from H.R. 1’s expanded base acre provisions or ballooned commodity subsidies. They lease out what they can’t farm and that is the catch, leasing land means they may not meet the USDA’s adjusted gross income rules or qualify for key programs, especially since they aren’t the ones actively farming every acre. Even if their lessees apply, Christine isn’t informed or included in the outcome.
“We never have [received subsidies],” she said. “And I wouldn’t know if they ever did, because that’s between them and the USDA.” If her family had access to the kind of subsidies that flow automatically to mega-operations wrapped in LLCs, she said, “we could stop working full-time and focus solely on this farm, and build the legacy for our future generations.”
With no access to base acre subsidies, and no full time farmer on site since their partner retired, Christine’s family had to reimagine survival. They turned to agritourism, not as some Instagrammable hobby, but as a damn lifeline. They ran u-pick sweet potatoes when they could, and now host seasonal events like Christmas in July, inviting BBQ trucks, bounce houses, and vendor booths to Sunset Acres in Benson.
Their Facebook page is less commodity price graphs and more handmade fliers for flower fields, school tours, and the kind of local economy building that should be celebrated by federal farm policy. Instead, it’s invisible.
Instead, they’re called “hobby farmers” by local elites like Fred Smith, a slap in the face to families just trying to preserve what was handed down. “It’s hard to maintain and take care of when we all work full time jobs,” Christine told me. When conservation easements offered a potential funding option, their lawyer warned them off, because once the land is tied up in an easement, it can only be sold to farmers. “There aren’t many farmers left,” she said, “and they can’t afford the business anymore.”
This is what Section 10308 erases, the nuance, the struggle, the millions of rural acres like Christine’s that don’t benefit from commodity protections or equity programs because the system was never written with families like hers in mind. She told me,” This is a lot of work but it’s preserving a legacy." Work that feeds families, connects communities, educates children and still doesn’t clear the USDA’s arbitrary bar for support.
It favors land barons, not land stewards. It protects agribusiness. They don’t have base acres or PLC elections. They don’t have a crop marketing team or a seat on the soybean board. They have sweat equity and not a damn ounce of USDA leverage.
Meanwhile, the so-called problem that Section 10308 fixes? Is that millionaire landowners were feeling a little too taxed. We can’t have that, right? Can't let the guy who owns 4,000 acres of irrigated soy and three shell LLCs tied to one last name be forced to sell his third combine. No, sir. Gotta protect that asshole. Gotta make sure the subsidy checks still land soft on that vacation estate portfolio, even if he hasn’t seen the inside of a tractor since Carter was in office.
This isn't hypothetical. The USDA’s own numbers said barely 0.1% of farms even hit the AGI cap in the first place. That means this reform doesn’t help 99.9% of farmers. It only helps the gilded exception, the ones already hoarding subsidies, land, and power like they’re preparing for the apocalypse.
I know what they’ll say. “But these are multi-generational farms! Land-rich, cash-poor!” Bullshit. You don’t run $1.2 million in AGI without access to financial advisers, legal shields, and asset-splitting gymnastics. If you can file Form 1024 for your holding corp and write off your irrigation under depreciation, you’re not cash-poor. You’re cash-strategic, and you consider the USDA is your personal checking account.
In Johnston County, we’ve watched this theft happen in real time. Between 2017 and 2022, USDA subsidies dropped $8.5 million across the county, not because people stopped needing help, but because the people who needed help were written out of the damn rules. Land rich absentee owners made bank while sweet potato growers got told to be patient by a county office that still can’t process Spanish language applications correctly.
Meanwhile, the very crops that benefit most from this subsidy racket? Corn. Soy. Cotton. Rice. Commodities that don’t show up at the corner farm stand or feed your neighbor’s kid. They show up as corn syrup in the lunch line and ultra-processed bullshit on the shelf of your local Wal-Mart
Even conservative economists admit the problem. Kimberly Amadeo called it out: “Most of the money goes toward large agribusinesses.”
That’s not a leftist talking point, it’s a bipartisan indictment of a system that throws billions at mega operators and lets people like my friend Jim Wiesner who is trying to hang onto his family’s field in Wilson’s Mills rot in silence as developers surround his property with cookie cutter homes.
Here’s how bad it fucking is, if a poor family on Medicaid gets a $300 raise, they might lose their healthcare. If a land baron makes $1.24 million and still files the right ag paperwork? The government says, “Congratulations, here’s another $155,000.” That’s not farm support. That’s reverse Robin Hood economics. It’s a USDA run concierge service for the aristocracy.
Christine Livingston and her family? They have never asked for a handout. They asked for a fair shot. For the kind of support that could keep them farming full time. But no one at USDA calls them actively engaged. No one indexes their struggle to inflation. No one writes columns about their generational legacy. They are just hobbyists.
When she tells me, “It’s hard to maintain this land when we all work full-time jobs,” I believe her. Because this isn’t a lazy family waiting for a check. This is a working family breaking their backs to keep a few acres out of the jaws of developers while the federal government prints subsidy checks for people who pay for private space for their farm executives at the JNX airport.
Section 10308 doesn’t close the gap. It widens the moat. It’s the USDA saying, if you’re not already rich, stay small, stay struggling, and stay grateful for crumbs. You don’t have a lobbyist. You don’t have an LLC. So you don’t count. You want to talk about theft? You want to talk about class war? Look no further than a policy that gives millionaires another way to get richer while telling Christine to settle for agritourism and Facebook raffles. This isn’t reform. It’s fucking wealth redistribution, from the poor to the powerful, but H.R.1 is calling it agriculture.
Sections 10309 & 10310 — Marketing Loans & Repayment: A Banker’s Playground, a Farmer’s Trap
Marketing loans were supposed to be the rope you grabbed when the floor fell out. The market crashes, you hand over your crop as collateral, the USDA floats you just enough to survive. That was the sales pitch — a cash advance against stored grain when prices tanked. But let’s stop pretending this ever worked for most of us. These loans were designed for folks who don’t just store grain, but own the damn grain elevator.
Now, with Sections 10309 and 10310, H.R. 1 doesn’t just reauthorize this system, it gives it a new engine and lets Big Ag take the wheel. The loan rates go up, the repayment terms get flexible, and suddenly this thing that was meant to be a safety net starts looking a whole lot more like a scalping tool for arbitrage.
Here’s the scam, the bill raises the loan rates. That means bigger advances from the USDA when you put your corn, soybeans, or cotton up as collateral. Under this new setup, if you’ve got a few hundred thousand bushels of corn or soybeans sitting in your silo, you can now borrow more against them. When the market dips, you borrow at the set USDA loan rate. When the market rebounds, you don’t have to repay at that higher price you repay the loan at the lower repayment rate. Then you sell your crop high and pocket the difference. You just gamed the system, and it’s all legal, courtesy of Congress.
This is another strategy for the already rich. It’s not farming, it’s arbitrage with acreage. If you don’t have the volume, the storage, the paperwork, or the market access? You’re not gaming anything. You're just praying your crop survives long enough to get to market, and that the prices don’t nosedive in the two weeks it takes USDA to process your forms.
The crops this setup favors? It’s always the same gang, corn, soy, cotton, wheat, and rice. The ones traded on commodity boards, sold by futures contracts, and harvested by folks who can afford downtime.
Got perishable produce? Tough shit. Growing specialty or culturally significant crops? Go cry into your green beans. Got ten acres leased behind a trailer park and planting for a local school co-op? You’re not even eligible to apply.
In Johnston County, where farmers like Jim and Christine are hanging onto generational land by their fingernails, trying to squeeze in one more harvest before developers carve another field into a subdivision, this marketing loan system might as well be written in Latin. They are not taking advantage of loan rate arbitrage. They are doing farm tours for children and hosting community events.
H.R. 1 re-ups all of it, loan rates, repayment rules, all of it without a damn line about reforming access for the people who actually grow our food and live in these towns. It’s all for the guys who can stack thousands of acres under shell corps, plant bulk row crops, store them for months, and hire someone else to watch the market.
That word repayment in Section 10310? Don’t be fooled. It’s not about making sure farmers pay loans back fairly. It’s about giving the big players options. The flexibility to wait, to game timing, to manipulate repayment just enough to squeeze extra profit. So the insider gets to borrow big, sit tight, sell high, and pay back low. That’s what farming is on Wall-Street, it’s ag-subsidized speculation.
Who pays for this? We do. Taxpayers. Working people. The ones already footing the bill for corporate crop insurance and dead dairy co-ops. We’re underwriting the margins of multinational operations while actual rural farmers get iced out, again.
You want an example of just how rigged this is? Ask any small grower in rural North Carolina not one of them will tell you they’ve ever qualified for a marketing loan. Not because they didn’t grow food. Because they didn’t grow the right kind of USDA sanctioned grain and they didn’t grow it on 1,500 acres.
Hmong farmers in Morganton? Never touched this program. Black growers near Rocky Mount? Shut out. Tenant farmers in Johnston County? Don’t even know it exists.
This is a system built to reinforce power. It’s not about marketing. It’s about margins and who gets to keep them. Everyone else? They are still hustling to pay for a used greenhouse while some absentee landowner sits on government cash and waits for the next price bump.
These sections don’t modernize a damn thing. They protect what’s always been protected. The grain. The leverage. The loan, and the ladder that stays pulled up while the rest fight over what’s left.
Section 10311 — Economic Adjustment Assistance for Textile Mills: Patriotic Theater for a Dead Industry
Every few years, Congress drags out the corpse of the American textile industry, props it up in front of a camera, and pretends they’re going to bring it back to life. Cue the faded denim, the union slogans they never believed in, and a fat-ass subsidy check to some mill that hasn’t employed a real crew since Jim Hunt was governor. H.R.1 is not bringing textile manufacturing back to the United States. That ship has long since sailed. This is lawmakers who gutted union protections, signed off on every trade deal that bled this region dry, and now want credit for tossing a lifeline after the boat sank.
Section 10311 of H.R. 1 keeps that performance rolling. They’re calling it economic adjustment assistance for textile mills, as if that phrase still means anything in a state where the looms were ripped out before half the workforce ever turned 30. There’s no revival happening here. Just more nostalgia-baiting pork for zombie corporations that gutted their communities and outsourced everything not bolted to the floor.
Take Alamance County. Take Rockingham. Names like Burlington Industries, Cone Mills, Spray Cotton, those mills weren’t just buildings, they were the economic backbone of entire counties. Generations worked 40 year careers under those roofs, paid mortgages, raised families, sent kids to school on union wages. Hundreds of plants that churned out denim and furniture and steady paychecks.
We watched as entire job sectors vanished without a safety net, because that net was never designed to catch us. Southern textile workers were sacrificed so executives could chase lower labor costs overseas. Now, here comes H.R. 1 with a cash drip for whatever mills still exist not to rehire workers, not to build worker co-ops, not to retool for sustainable fiber, just to keep corporate owners solvent. Because that’s who this bill cares about.
Let’s not forget why these mills disappeared in the first place. NAFTA. WTO. Bipartisan free trade deals that were sold to us as opportunity but turned out to be death sentences. Corporate boards said they had to stay competitive. So they shipped the jobs to sweatshops, pocketed the profit, and left the South with broken towns and broken backs. Asphalt is now buckling in the parking lot where men and women once clocked in daily for work. You can see the outline of the old economy in the broken bricks behind the Dollar General.
This bill doesn’t reverse any of that. It doesn’t put looms back in Eden or bring back sewing lines in Rockingham. It doesn’t restore the paychecks, the pensions, or the sense of purpose. It just drops a few million into companies that already survived off consolidation, automation, and the blood memory of “Made in America” branding.
You better believe this money isn’t going to the workers who stood on concrete floors for 10 hours a day to send their kids to college. It’s going to the companies that replaced them with machines, slashed shifts, killed unions, and threw a flag sticker on a cotton bale to make it look local.
This so called textile relief doesn’t have a damn thing to do with textiles. It’s about politics. These subsidies are campaign props. Drive a senator through Alamance County, point at a shuttered mill, slap a flag on it, and promise resurrection. Never mind that the same damn senator voted to export the jobs in the first place.
Meanwhile, folks who once worked in those mills? They’re working two jobs now. Retail shifts. DoorDash routes. Maybe selling plates on the weekends to make the rent. H.R. 1 gives them nothing. No wage support. No rural jobs program. No union protection. Just the insult of pretending a few scraps thrown at a dead industry is somehow economic justice.
What would real justice look like? Wage restitution, local ownership, worker-led co-ops, green fiber tech. Retraining programs led by the folks who lost their jobs, not some executive who lives three states away and couldn’t pick Alamance off a map.
That’s not what we got. We got a ghost subsidy for a ghost economy. They’re zombie operations, kept alive with government money and campaign donations. This isn’t targeted relief for struggling communities. It’s a policy séance, throwing taxpayer money at ghosts while the real people who used to work those jobs are left managing chronic pain, gig work, and food insecurity
I’ll tell you what’s worse, while they pour money into this nostalgic cosplay, they’re gutting SNAP, Medicaid, housing aid, the actual lifelines people use right now to survive. The ones single mothers and aging textile retirees still rely on every damn day.
Section 10311 isn’t a patriotic revival of America first textile. It's performative. It's a costume drama for a party that doesn’t give a damn about labor. It’s nostalgia cosplay wrapped in a subsidy check. It is another way for politicians to tour a half dead factory, snap a photo, and say they care while never giving a shit the things rural working families actually need to survive.
They broke the looms, burned the contracts, and now they want us to clap because they threw a flag over the ashes.
Section 10312 — Sugar Program Updates: The Sweetheart Deal from Hell
There’s a myth we keep getting sold about farm bills, that they’re about fairness, resilience, feeding the people. But this section? It’s not about any of that. It’s about hoarding.
Here’s how the scam works. The federal government props up domestic sugar prices by capping how much can be sold, restricting imports, and handing out USDA-backed loans to sugar processors so rich they don’t even blink at $50,000 lobbyist dinners. These aren’t farmers growing cane in the Florida or Louisiana heat.
These are vertically integrated corporations, people like the Fanjul brothers and Florida Crystals who control the entire supply chain, from field to refinery to PAC donation list. They sit at the top of this rigged system, shielded from competition and sweetened by taxpayer backed loans they almost never have to repay. It guarantees loans to processors so rich they don’t even blink at $10,000 a plate fundraisers.
H.R. 1 reauthorizes this program without a single damn reform. Not one. The price supports stay. The loan guarantees stay. The marketing allotments stay. The quotas stay. The monopoly stays. While the American people keep paying more than anyone else on earth for a goddamn bag of sugar.
The USDA literally buys up surplus sugar and sells it off to ethanol producers at a loss just to keep the price from falling. Who’s footing the bill? We are. Every checkout line. Every birthday cake. Every school cafeteria. Every food pantry that tries to stretch a budget but can’t afford the markup baked into every processed product with added sugar, which is, of course, most of the damn shelf.
So if you read or hear this program is about stability or national interest, see who actually benefits. Because it damn sure isn’t a single mom trying to feed three kids on WIC and food stamps being flooded with subsidized processed food loaded with federally supported sugar. It sure as hell won’t help an old man who now has to go to Wal-Mart because his local pharmacy shut down, counting pennies to afford his insulin.
This section is exactly what’s wrong with H.R. 1, it doesn’t just ignore the poor. It taxes their hunger to subsidize wealth. This program doesn’t protect farmers. It protects ownership. It protects monopoly. It protects the companies who can buy politicians and shut out competition.
These aren’t just businesses. They’re political machines. The Florida sugar lobby has more influence over federal ag policy than every struggling farm in eastern North Carolina combined. These companies get sweetheart deals, while the rest of us get rationed crumbs and lectures about free markets.
The sugar lords ain’t losing any sleep. They’ve got contracts, insulation, and direct lines to the appropriations subcommittee. Meanwhile, here in North Carolina, the most expensive bag of sugar you’ll ever buy is the one you don’t see. The one you pay for with your taxes, your grocery bill, your kids’ lunch. The one that funds the empire while your neighbor gets cut off from EBT. This is the sweet deal that sours everything else Trump just re-signed the damn lease.
Sec. 10313 – Dairy Policy Updates: The Cream Always Rises—Unless You’re at the Bottom
This section is sold as milk stabilization. That it’s good for farmers. That it supports family dairies. That it keeps prices steady for consumers. That’s cow dung. Pasteurized and packaged.
Section 10313 of H.R. 1 is a loyalty oath to consolidation. A protection racket for the milk monopolies. It’s not designed to help your cousin with ten cows in Clayton or the Mennonite farmer hauling jugs to the market. This is about guaranteeing profit margins for multi-state conglomerates that own the milk, the processing, the distribution, and the Senate Agriculture Committee.
What does H.R. 1 do here? It tweaks the dairy margin coverage formulas. It locks in risk management tools. It tweaks the support thresholds and resets the math behind what’s considered a loss. In theory, it’s about stabilizing prices. But in practice? It’s a hedge fund’s dream, risk offloaded, profits protected, no accountability in sight.
You think a small dairy producer qualifies for these tweaks? You think they can game the federal margins or file quarterly to prove their eligibility? Hell no. They’re scrapping aluminum to buy feed. They’re trying to keep the land out of a developer’s hands. They’re fighting to pass something to their kids that isn’t just debt in a barn.
Corporations snapping up foreclosed dairy operations are the ones who win here. Look at the banks that now hold more milking infrastructure than the families that built it. Look at the massive cooperatives that cut jobs and increase throughput while claiming the mantle of efficiency, that is who benefits from this.
Don’t even start with saving the dairy industry. The real dairy industry died the day it stopped being about families and started being about financial instruments. The day fluid milk was a futures contract, not a glass on the table. The day state fairs started showcasing branded co-ops instead of generational farms. That shift didn’t happen all at once, but we can damn well trace the bones.
The real death knell for family dairies started ringing in the 1980s, when Reagan-era deregulation let corporate agribusiness consolidate everything. You had the Milk Diversion Program of 1984 and then the Dairy Termination Program of 1986, policies that paid small family farms to stop producing milk, while giving the green light to bigger operations to swallow up the slack. All in the name of stabilizing prices. Stabilizing for who? The processors and conglomerates, not the families in overalls getting up at 4 a.m.
By the 1990s, milk was a Wall Street toy. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) started trading Class III milk futures in 1996, turning fluid milk into a speculative commodity. That was the final fucking insult. A farmer wasn’t just contending with weather, feed costs, or herd health, now they had to track traders betting on global supply chains like they were gambling chips.
Meanwhile, dairy co-ops like DFA (Dairy Farmers of America), which were supposed to protect small producers, turned into branding empires, sucking in independent farms under marketing contracts and setting milk prices through secret formulas. At state fairs, you stopped seeing “Johnsons from Yadkin County, 4th generation Holsteins.” Instead, it was Land O’Lakes™, Dean Foods, and a cartoon cow with a PR team. The death began in the 1980s, got auctioned off in the 1990s, and by the 2000s, the dairy aisle was just another logo war.
All while rural suicide rates climbed, barns emptied out, and politicians fed us nostalgic bullshit about heartland values as they took money from the very monopolies that crushed those values beneath the wheels of efficiency. Don’t you dare tell me this was progress. It was a hostile takeover with a side of cheddar.
Meanwhile, kids in poor rural areas are drinking powdered milk at school because budgets can’t keep up. Milk checkoffs and quotas force producers to pay into marketing schemes they’ll never benefit from. Immigrant dairy workers labor 18-hour shifts with no union, no voice, no protection, risking deportation while propping up a system that pays out dividends to shareholders and bankruptcy notices to farmers.
The cruelest fucking part? We are being sold the rhetoric about saving the family farm like it’s a thing you can do with a spreadsheet and the people it hurts the most are constantly buying into this bullshit. No amount of margin tweaking will save the barn if the roof’s been caving in since 1984.
Because it was never about saving farms. It was about saving the illusion, long enough to keep the milk checks flowing and the votes compliant. The system isn’t broken, this shit works just as intended. The family farm is the corpse agribusiness lobbyists wearing flag pins keep dragging out for PAC campaign ads.
Section 10314 — Implementation: Dressing Up a Corpse
This is the part is supposed to be all about modernization. Technology. Efficiency. Data upgrades. This is where they hide the wiring that powers the entire scam. Section 10314 is the fuse box, and it’s sparking like hell.
Fifty million dollars. No sunset date. Permanent funding buried in USDA bureaucracy. Not to help farmers. Not to build equity. Not to fix a damn thing. Just to keep the same rotting infrastructure running smoother, faster, and with fewer people noticing the stench.
They say it’s for implementation of Subtitle C. What that really means is: keeping the base acre bureaucracy alive, propping up the commodity shell game, and reinforcing the same digital choke points that keep the USDA’s gatekeeping intact. In Johnston County, that doesn’t mean more support. It means more denial letters delivered faster, in better envelopes.
Historically, USDA’s implementation funding, stretching all the way back to the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, has always walked a line between improving efficiency and reinforcing status quo systems. What has stayed the same for nearly nine decades is the agency’s devotion to base acreage maintenance, commodity stabilization, and data-driven decision-making that disproportionately centers the needs of established producers. Whether it was crop allotments in 1938 or common land units in today’s precision ag software, the federal government has always funded infrastructure to serve those already in the system, not those kept out.
Now, what’s being added? Most of the $50 million is chopped up like pork at an eastern nc bbq shack - $9 million for biennial dairy yield surveys that’ll mostly help manufacturers; $6 million more for producer education tools and decision aids that have existed in some form since the 2002 and 2014 Farm Bills; and $5 million to enhance technology and streamline USDA interfaces, language that’s been recycled since the Acreage Crop Reporting and Streamlining Initiative launched in 2013.
It’s bureaucratic déjà vu. Farmers will still use the same damn online portal where they forget their password and give up halfway through the damn application process.
It’s not just what’s in here. It’s what’s missing. There isn’t any innovation. It’s upkeep for a machine designed to exclude. There’s no funding for technical assistance targeted at BIPOC producers. No updates to address heirs property or land access barriers. No digitization of outdated FSA records in counties still using paper ledgers from 1994. Just more wires plugged into the same damn wall, hoping the lights don’t flicker when they cut the next budget.
Nothing in this section makes it easier to get support if you're a tenant farmer, an heir property landowner, or an immigrant grower who doesn’t speak USDA’s coded legalese. There’s no funding for language access, no reform of the deobligation traps that claw back money years after it's promised, no accountability for the legacy data systems that erase entire populations from the ledger.
H.R. 1 doesn’t fix farm policy. It installs a new operating system over the same corrupt code. It reinforces the bureaucracy that makes small farmers invisible while telling the public the system is being modernized. What they’re modernizing is control. What they’re optimizing is exclusion. It expands capacity for those already documented. But if you’re standing on the land, farming it, living it and not already in the USDA’s system you’re still invisible. Just like Jim. It’s like upgrading the paint job on a harvester while ignoring the rust in the engine. The rules are still built for the row crop elite, and the rest of us are just trying not to get mulched in the gears.
Subtitle D — Section 10401: Disaster Aid with a Handshake and a Knife
There is a little bit to be positive about here in Section 10401. It expands disaster relief for farm raised fish, bee colonies, tree crops, and even unborn livestock. For folks raising catfish or tending pecan groves, this might finally mean getting paid for losses they’ve eaten for years.
One of the best changes tucked in here is about honeybee disaster payments. Before this bill, beekeepers had to prove that more than 15% of their bees died on top of what was considered normal. In other words, if 20% of your bees died, but the USDA decided 15% was just part of the game? You only got paid for that extra 5%. Which barely covered anything.
Now, under H.R. 1, they’ve changed it: 15% is the new baseline. That means any death rate above that can trigger support, without adjusting it down and calling the rest just how it goes.
It’s a small shift, but a big deal for beekeepers getting slammed by pesticides, parasites, heat, and crop loss. For once, the USDA might actually admit the normal is already a crisis. That’s good. But it’s also the bare fucking minimum.
There is a slight admittance to climate change with an addition in this section for new disaster payment for unborn livestock, calves, lambs, kids, (not the human kind), that die before they’re born due to extreme weather, disease, or stress. They are actually recognizing something very real happening on farms.
Heatwaves, floods, poor forage quality, and worsening storms are messing with animal pregnancies. Farmers lose unborn animals all the time now, especially in cattle, sheep, and goats, but until now, those losses didn’t count for federal disaster aid. If it wasn’t born yet, it didn’t exist on paper.
This policy finally acknowledges that losing a calf in the womb still costs money, still devastates a herd, and still threatens a farm’s bottom line. That’s progress, in theory. The catch? Like the rest of the program, accessing the aid is a paperwork nightmare, and the payments are capped and delayed.
So what about the climate conditions causing the losses? That part is ignored because hiding beneath all that buzzword-y promise, this is reactive aid, not resilience. They’ll help you rebuild after the barn floods, but they slashed the money that would’ve helped you stop it in the first place.
Because what H.R. 1 gives in disaster aid, it rips out tenfold from resilience. The $20 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding meant to help farmers adapt to climate collapse? Gone. No more drought resilience programs. No more soil retention incentives. No more help rebuilding barns before the hurricane. Just a tiny check after everything’s already burned or drowned.
Even that check? It’s delayed. It’s capped. It’s at the USDA Secretary’s discretion, which means if you’re not already in the system, you’ll be standing in line behind a dozen corporate applicants with pre-certified records and in-house lawyers.
There is no justice here, there is only hush money. They’ll pay you for the calf that never lived, but they won’t help you build a shade structure to keep the next one from dying.
Who’s left out again? Black farmers. Immigrant farmers. Anyone without pristine records. Anyone who can’t click through fifteen USDA tabs to print a form the local office stopped stocking. The very people who've been excluded from every other program will now be excluded from rebuilding, too.
Disaster aid without climate mitigation is a sick joke. It’s reactive charity from the same government that gutted the prevention budget. They let the barn flood, then hand you a bucket. They call it help. They call it compassion. But it’s just another way to stall the collapse long enough for the developers to swoop in.
Resilience isn’t just about funding storms, it’s about surviving the slow erosion of public investment. When the well dries up? When the broadband fails again? When another new build throws fire into the air and ash onto your vehicles, like Jim Wiesner watched happen at 6th Generation Farms, where's the USDA then? H.R. 1 might fund unborn calves, but it sure as hell doesn’t fund that.
The End of This Chapter, Not the End of the Fight
I didn’t plan to take this long with commodities. Life, like policy, doesn’t follow neat timelines.
I thought I’d knock this out in three days, break down a few reference price tweaks, yell about rice, and move on.
But the deeper I dug, the more I saw how every page of H.R. 1 was a blueprint for rural dispossession. Every clause, a nail in the coffin of independent agriculture. Every section, another way to bleed families off their land while pretending to protect them.
I’ve told you about Johnston County.
Packed into the policy talk there are real people like Christine Livingston, juggling jobs while fighting to keep her family’s land from vanishing.
I’ve told you about heirs property and LLC loopholes and broken barns and empty fields. I’ve told you what this bill does to working people, like Jim Wiesner, who’s still trying to hold onto his family’s farm in Wilson’s Mills, surrounded on all sides by development and indifference.
Jim’s not looking for a windfall. He’s looking for fairness. Like so many others, he’s met silence.
If you're still with me after all this, you probably care more about commodity policy than you thought. Or maybe, like me, you see how even the driest farm bill clause touches real lives. Either way, I’m not done.
The next chapter? We dig into the sweetheart crop insurance handouts. The private insurers who siphon billions while tenant farmers can’t even qualify. The system that protects speculation and punishes stewardship.
Because the soil remembers everything, and this bill is trying to bury the truth beneath concrete.
Data sourced from the following.
1. Kristine A. Tidgren, “Reviewing the Agricultural Provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation, Iowa State University, July 11, 2025.
2. Roger A. McEowen, “One Big Beautiful Bill Act – Commodities Subtitle,” Agricultural Law and Taxation Blog, Law Professor Blogs Network, July 6, 2025.
3. U.S. Congress, H.R. 1: One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 119th Cong., updated July 9, 2025.
4. Brad Johnson, “Midnight Emission: Senate GOP’s One Big Brutal Bill Act To Kill the Green New Deal,” Hill Heat, June 28, 2025