There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers, but it comes at a serious cost. With regulations continuously eroding this will only get worse.
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
Luckily the article includes a PDF with multiple recommendations at the end. https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Reco...
I know this sounds crazy, but maybe we can stop eroding regulations. This obsession with 'regulations bad' is going to destroy us all.
> There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
>Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I would fully support such a mandate, for meat products too.
It would be interesting, giving consumers more information is nearly always better, it opens the door for open source analysis, the 2nd and 3rd order effects would probably be mostly harmless and highly entertaining.
>I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a McDonalds burger.
They're be too busy being angry that "BNSF Alliance Intermodal Facility, Haslet Texas" is in fact not an avocado farm.
The illusion is the Whole Foods shopper thinking that the McDonalds food is crap. Great marketing from the "health food" industry making you think that it's McDonalds making you fat. Raw cane sugar (sold to you at a premium markup over the already more expensive production cost) is, by implication, less bad for you.
this sounds a lot like "vote with your wallet" and then you look in 99% of the wallets and it's like, here's a few million dollars vs trillionaires.
I don't think we're working against trillionaires here. I don't think there's anyone in this situation with that sort of net worth.
We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
The oligarchs are gutting the regulatory apparatus that stops this stuff from happening.
https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-pow...