This is the third column in USA TODAY Opinion columnist Rex Huppke’s ongoing series, America’s Looming Farm Crisis. It looks at the reasons farmers are struggling to stay afloat and details flaws in the U.S. agricultural system.

MAZEPPA, Minnesota — Rod Sommerfield is a third-generation farmer, still working land that has been in his family since 1892.

I sat with him and his son recently at the kitchen table in their southeastern Minnesota farmhouse on a rainy late-summer day, the healthy soil on their 500-acre corn and soybean farm soaking up the water. We talked about the struggles U.S. farmers are facing with the high cost of seeds, fuel and fertilizer outpacing crop prices.

Sommerfield, not short on opinions, offered a succinct and telling summation: “Most of the farmers aren’t farmers. They’re the farmed. They’re being farmed by the big corporations.”

That’s an apt description. To understand the perilous financial situation so many American farmers face, a situation that impacts us all, you have to understand that they operate in a vice that squeezes out any chance they have of dictating the economic terms of their own operations.

Farmers do all the work, take all the risk and still get squeezed by Big Ag

At the top and bottom of our nation’s domestic food supply sit a small handful of giant agricultural corporations. Some sell farm inputs, like seeds, fertilizer and equipment. Some control the processing and sale of what’s grown or raised.

In the middle, doing all the work, taking all the risk and cast into often-hopeless financial situations, sit American farmers, fighting to maintain a foundational livelihood often passed down through generations.

It's a fight they're in the thick of right now, as farming teeters on the cusp of an economic crisis, giving some farmers flashbacks to the lead-up to the devastating 1980s farm crisis.

The reason nonfarmers like myself should be worried about this is simple: More than 80% of the food we eat comes from the domestic supply chain. If farmers aren't doing well, the rest of us are feeling it, in everything from elevated food costs to food shortages. As I wrote in the first column of this series, when farming gets a cold, America gets sick.

Corporations control what goes into – and comes out of – farms

Corporate control over the materials that go into farming and the processing of what comes out of farms is part of what has given present-day farming a cold.

According to Farm Action, a nonpartisan farmer-led watchdog group, 83% of corn seeds come from just four corporations. About the same percentage of nitrogen fertilizer comes from four corporations. Most beef processing is controlled by four corporations.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that just two companies – Corteva and Bayer – “provided more than half the U.S. retail seed sales of corn, soybeans, and cotton” from 2018 to 2020.

This input/output consolidation makes farmers the meat stuffed inside a sausage, pinched tight on both ends. If you're a crop farmer, there's little price competition on the input side when only a handful of companies control the market. Same with cattle farmers on the output side.

According to the USDA, the four largest firms handle "85 percent of all steer and heifer purchases."

“Corporations have all the levers. You’re no longer an independent farmer selling to someone,” said Peter Schwagerl, a farmer in western Minnesota’s Big Stone County. “You’re contract labor to go do the thing.”

Corporate consolidation on the front........

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