By Bill Pluecker
The American public has been conditioned to believe that cheap food is a public good — that rock-bottom prices at the grocery store represent agricultural success. But this myth obscures the truth: Our food system is designed not to nourish communities but to extract wealth from the workers, farmers, animals, and rural areas that produce our food.
The numbers tell a stark story. When my farm was operating at full capacity, we grossed approximately $25,000 per acre selling fresh vegetables directly to consumers through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program. Meanwhile, commodity farmers consider themselves fortunate to gross $1,000 per acre growing corn and soybeans. They would not be solvent without agricultural policies that overwhelmingly support them.
The 2018 Farm Bill allocated $68 billion to propping up commodity agriculture through crop insurance and subsidies, and the One Big Beautiful Bill passed in July 2025 added another $60 billion to that tab. The portion actually supporting small independent producers who produce food for people rather than industrial agricultural inputs and fuel? A mere 1% of the total. This isn’t just inefficient policy; it’s a mechanism of extraction that benefits corporations at the expense of farmers, rural communities, and public health.
The extraction begins with a simple principle: buy low, sell high. Farmers earn pennies on every dollar their products fetch in grocery stores. The real money gets made downstream by processors and distributors who can move products to more valuable markets, and by retailers who capture the final markup.
Commodity markets favor those who can play market timing, not those with a product ready to harvest. Meanwhile, grocery stores are starting to implement a dynamic pricing model, where prices fluctuate based on real-time factors like demand, competition, and inventory. Retailers use algorithms and data analytics to adjust prices to maximize revenue and respond to market changes, ensuring that they are maximizing profits while farmers are stuck taking whatever price is offered on the commodity market.
Meanwhile, commodities themselves are propped up by dubious societal choices: burning corn as ethanol fuel and consuming high-fructose corn syrup in processed foods. We see no equivalent lifestyle manipulation to support consumption of fresh vegetables or pastured meat.
The system forces consolidation at every level. Only by controlling a thousand acres or more can commodity farmers survive, and even then they depend on government checks when prices drop, seeds don’t germinate, or weather turns bad. Wealth flows directly to those with access to land, not to those producing the highest quality food for their communities.
This consolidation extends beyond land ownership. A handful of corporations control seed production, fertilizer manufacturing, and pesticide distribution. These inputs have become de facto taxes on farmers who cannot access commodity markets without purchasing them. Farmers are trapped: They must buy from monopolies and sell back into the same consolidated system, with no effective control over pricing or markets.
But the system doesn’t just extract money, it profits off the poor health of eaters, farmers, and rural communities dependent on their environment.
Farmers are expected to deploy chemical poisons to maximize yields as cheaply as possible. Chemical companies test their products in laboratories in isolation, ignoring the reality of multiple long-term exposures from different chemicals over a lifetime — the actual conditions in agricultural communities. So, the poisons keep flowing. PFAS and similar contaminants accumulate in soil, water, and human bodies until farmers can no longer make a living from their land.
These chemicals don’t stop at the farm gate. They steal the health of consumers through increased cancer rates, poor childhood health outcomes, and reproductive problems. As long as these costs remain diffuse enough to escape notice, chemical corporations continue reaping billions in profits. When harm becomes undeniable, they employ the “delay, deny, depose” strategy — dragging out claims, rejecting them outright, and defending their position until claimants give up or die.
Farmworkers face their own form of extraction, rooted in historical oppression and the societal belief that food must be cheap. Immigration status becomes a weapon wielded against workers through short-term work visas and bureaucratic run-around when they attempt to renew them — systems that deny stability and power. Their deep knowledge of growing systems goes unrecognized and unrewarded. They provide essential labor for an industry that treats them as disposable.
This parallels historical wrongs born from genocide and slavery — wrongs never repaired but instead built upon to create our current system. Families remain dependent on public benefits because their labor was never fully valued or fairly compensated, and are then put at the mercy of a government that further devalues their work.
The solution isn’t more efficient extraction — it’s fundamentally reimagining what we value. Within an organic perspective, and MOFGA’s mission, we look at the combined bottom line of financial and environmental sustainability. The best farmer isn’t measured only through their profit but also by their stewardship of land, air, water, and animals. If we valued conservation over profit, our agricultural spending would flow towards supporting small independent organic farmers, local processing infrastructure, and community access to local healthy food.
Organic markets and methods offer local farmers the ability to be self-sufficient economically but also to harness biological systems for fertility production and pest control. Organic has the power to move us out of the cycle of dependence on constant inputs that stress our health and our pocketbooks.
We must resurface our communities in our food production. This means telling our stories, whether our homes are places contaminated by industrial agriculture, or our family’s health was sacrificed for corporate profits, or our communities were left hungry while surrounded by agricultural commodity production destined for industrial processing. By telling our stories in the media, we can sustain the vision of our organic forebears, moving our government representatives to dismantle systems creating these inequalities and recognize every individual’s sovereign right to feed themselves, their families, and their communities.
Cheap food isn’t cheap. We pay for it with poisoned land, broken health, hollowed-out rural communities, and wealth transferred to corporations. Real food security means supporting farmers who nurture rather than extract, building local food systems that circulate wealth within communities, and valuing the health of people and land over corporate profit margins.
The Public Policy Teach-In at the 2025 Common Ground Country Fair, organized by MOFGA’s public policy team was titled “Countering the ‘Race to the Bottom,’” and brought together speakers representing farmworker rights, policy advocacy, public financing, and animal welfare to discuss how to undo the political policy and social narrative that the cheapest food is the best food. Panelists shared, for example, how organic farmers work to undo this narrative by taking environmental, worker, farmer, and animal health into account in their business planning. They also discussed the need for public investment that reflects our morals and priorities by supporting small- and medium- scale sustainable farming instead of propping up commodity agriculture. Watch the policy teach-in on MOFGA’s YouTube channel.
Bill Pluecker is working to engage MOFGA’s membership and farming community in pursuit of our shared policy goals as MOFGA’s public policy organizer. He’s been farming for 20 years and is serving his final term in the Maine Legislature.
This article was originally published in the winter 2025-2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.