Jack was the very first employee at Stone Barns Center, hired in 2003 to build a greenhouse on what was still a Rockefeller cattle operation. He’s been the farmer behind Blue Hill at Stone Barns ever since. And in this week’s episode of One Bite is Everything, he tells me what that partnership is actually like from the inside. Two people with the same vision and completely different ways of getting there. Teams in conflict. Years-long arguments over cover crops. In Jack’s words, “Nobody likes no.”

Early on, Jack was growing Mokum carrots, tiny and sweet and perfect. Dan asked him to pick them smaller. Then smaller. Then smaller still. Jack pushed back. Why harvest a carrot before its prime? The crew thought it was ridiculous. Then he watched what happened on the plate: a whole miniature carrot, greens still attached, everything it had to say intact. That carrot has now been on the Blue Hill menu longer than any other dish. They call it the Fence Carrot, and it’s what happens when two headstrong finally get on the same page.

Jack says the friction is the point and it breeds excellence. He and Dan are stuck with each other the way a farmer and a kitchen should be, the way our whole food system should be and isn’t. Mutual reliance. High stakes. The occasional good fight.

We also talk about his beautiful new book, Seeding Hope, what it means to steward land instead of repairing it, and the idea he calls grounded hope, which I suspect a lot of us need right now.

If you love a good farmer-chef story, this one’s for you.

xo Dana

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

“I got contacted by someone who shopped [my Wish List]. Besides the incredible gift of being shopped for, it was so wonderful to make a connection with a community member I may not have had the chance to connect with otherwise. Makes me feel less alone in this work!”

Less alone in this work.

A wish list is simple on its face. A farmer lists what the farm needs, from work gloves to a roll of drip tape to a walk-in cooler, and anyone can buy an item and send it straight to the farm. But the supplies are only the first layer.

For a farmer, the list is a rare moment of naming what would actually help. Sometimes it’s immediate stuff and sometimes more long term. Small farms take a lot of input and farmers operate on tight margins that often have them making do with broken or missing tools. When a Wish List box arrives, the message inside is bigger than the item. I see you. I want you to be here next season.

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For the shopper, a Wish List is the most honest view of a small farm you may ever get. Tree tubes, harvest crates, irrigation tubing. Socks that work well in stiff work boots. Scroll one list and you can begin to understand, item by item, what it takes for a small farmer to put food on your table.

You can hear this whole story in the latest episode of One Bite is Everything. Farmer Megan Despres of Biscuitwood Farm in New York’s Scoharie County had a wish list nobody had shopped. One little Instagram comment, a few DMs, and one small fix later, she woke up to find her entire list cleared. She says it changed how the whole farm felt, almost instantly.

When you’re done, go check out the Wish Lists For Farmers. Send a little something to a farmer in your state — some gloves, something more technical, whatever catches your eye. I can promise you this: you’ll be sending much more than supplies.

Wish Lists For Farmers

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

This piece started out as a straightforward roundup. Then, midway through writing it, Maine’s Senate race blew up, a nominee dropped out, a party scrambled to replace him, and what began as a simple list of candidates turned into something worth considering a little longer. Since then, a second scandal has reshaped a House race too (not what any of us were hoping for).

A precursor to this article happened in 2024 when I interviewed , America’s Government Teacher, the Instagram phenom behind , on the One Bite is Everything podcast to talk about the history of farmers in politics, among other things. Fast forward to my inbox of late, full of hopeful farmers — from both parties — looking to get back to the Hill. So, I quilted this all together to get a better look at this story for myself as much as I did it for you.

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There’s a real story in this year’s midterms, and it’s not the one you’d expect. In a cycle where farm income is down, tariffs are squeezing margins, and rural hospitals are closing, the candidates stepping up to run on that pain are almost all Democrats. That’s not a framing choice. It’s what the primary results actually show.

But before getting to who’s running, it’s worth understanding how Congress ended up with almost no farmers in it at all. That question was the whole premise of the conversation I had with Sharon McMahon, and her answer reshapes how this entire election cycle should be considered.

The vanishing farmer in Washington

As recently as the mid-20th century, farming was a normal background for the highest offices in the country. “As late as the mid-20th century, these were men who came from family farms,” McMahon told me, pointing to Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman. Henry Wallace, one of FDR’s vice presidents, started a seed company that later became Pioneer Hybrid International and was a well-known figure in agriculture before he ever held office. John Adams kept his own farm in Braintree. Jimmy Carter actually worked his family’s peanut farm, not as a hobby but as his livelihood, before he became president. “It used to be that farmers could and would achieve the highest levels of governmental power,” McMahon said.

What changed wasn’t one thing. Post-World War II growth and the Great Migration, when millions of Black agricultural workers left the South for northern cities, shifted who was farming and where. At the same time, large corporations began buying up family land and consolidating it into agricultural conglomerates, and farming shifted from something a lawmaker’s family did to a specialized industry most lawmakers had no connection to at all. “This erasure of farmers who then go on to achieve some kind of political power,” is how McMahon describes the result. Since Carter, no president has been a working farmer. Some, like LBJ, had land and horses, which McMahon distinguishes from actually farming for a living: “That was a little bit more of like, we got some land and we got some horses.”

Fewer than 2 percent of Americans are farmers today, which is part of the story. But McMahon’s sharper point is about incentives, not headcount.

Why farmers became political pawns

Congress, McMahon argues, used to reward members for delivering results. “It used to be that somebody would get elected to Congress based on what they had accomplished for their district or their state,” she said. “I helped make sure that the farmers of Missouri, or the farmers of Indiana… had what they needed. And that was how somebody could continue to get reelected.”

That incentive structure has flipped. “Now the incentive structure has changed,” McMahon said, “so that it is no longer based on results that a member of Congress has achieved for their district or their state, and instead is based on how much that representative or senator has stuck it to the other side.” Outrage clips are what go viral, and viral clips are what raise money. “They literally hear ka-ching,” she said, describing the moment a committee-room takedown starts trending. “They can raise millions of dollars from one viral moment. And that is how they consolidate and maintain power.”

Farm bills are a direct casualty of that shift. They’re omnibus legislation, meaning they bundle agricultural policy together with things like SNAP funding, and McMahon pointed to a telling example: a Republican farmer in Ohio, deeply involved in state GOP politics for years, publicly warned that electing Jim Jordan as speaker (a current event at the time I interviewed her) would be dangerous for farmers, because in 15 years representing a rural district, Jordan had never once voted for a farm bill. “Farmers should not be part of the culture war,” McMahon said. “What they do is too important for us to spend time arguing about them. You go ahead and argue about who should be on the school board, and feel free to have those arguments and discussions, that’s great. But farmers are the backbone of society. They should not be caught in the crosshairs of a culture war.”

The squeeze: monopolies, farm bills, and the grocery bill

This is the part that matters most for consumers, and McMahon was clear that they should care regardless of whether they’ve ever set foot on a farm. A small number of companies, among them Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, ADM, and Bunge, now control most of the seed, chemical, meat processing, and grain trade markets in this country. Four companies control 85 to 90 percent of American beef and pork processing.

McMahon sees a real tension in how farmers talk about government as a result. “I hear from farmers, we don’t want government regulations, just stay off, don’t tell me what kind of milk I can sell,” she said. “Yet then when you have what maybe started off as a farm, and maybe contracts with family farmers, becomes a big oligopoly or monopoly, then farmers are like, wait a minute, we can’t actually make a living, because there’s this giant conglomerate of four companies controlling everything.”

Her read is that both instincts are legitimate, and the trick is balancing them. “It’s perfectly understandable why people resist having government tell them what to do,” she said. “But allowing a capitalist system that will speed towards monopoly also does not benefit them. So too much of one thing ultimately ends up being harmful.” She compared it to an airline merger a judge blocked because it would have been bad for consumers, arguing the same logic applies to agricultural conglomerates: left unchecked, they consolidate, and consolidation squeezes out the family farms trying to stay afloat.

McMahon’s bottom line: farmers need an actual seat at the regulatory table, not because they should get everything they ask for, but because the people currently writing agricultural policy mostly have no connection to where their own food comes from. “Farmers are the people that government should be listening to in this regard,” she said. “What is it that would be helpful to you? What is it that you need our assistance with? And also, what is it that you do not need our assistance with? I alone cannot go up against these multinational corporations. That is where the power of the federal government has to be wielded, because individual farmers can’t do it on their own.”

That’s the backdrop. Here’s who’s trying to change it this cycle, and what’s happened to their races in just the last week or two.

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The Democrats trying to get back in

Hallie Shoffner, Arkansas (D) vs. Sen. Tom Cotton (R)

Shoffner is a sixth-generation farmer from Newport, in the Arkansas Delta, who grew up working soybean, rice, corn, cotton, and wheat fields alongside her parents. After nine years running the family’s roughly 2,000-acre operation, she and her parents made the call last year to shut it down rather than risk their retirement, blaming rising input costs, bad markets, tariffs, and a Farm Bill that never delivered relief. She now runs Delta Harvest, a company connecting small and mid-sized Delta farmers with buyers. She cleared her primary with 78 percent of the vote.

What she’s saying: Shoffner’s case is that Cotton has had a decade to fix the conditions that killed her farm and instead voted against Farm Bills in 2013 and 2018, against Medicaid, and against disaster relief, while backing tax cuts she calls a giveaway to “land barons.” Her platform centers on protecting the ACA, Medicare, and Medicaid, expanding rural healthcare access, and treating the state’s economic divide as a class issue rather than a partisan one. She’s also worked to distance herself from national Democratic figures, telling one interviewer that both parties “just walked away from rural America, Democrats included,” and declining to campaign alongside Kamala Harris during a Little Rock visit.

What’s new: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services formally denied Arkansas’s request to renew a hybrid Medicaid program that used federal dollars to buy private insurance for low-income residents, handing Shoffner a live example of exactly the kind of federal healthcare fight she’s campaigning on. Local coverage has also started describing the race as “surprisingly competitive,” with her coalition reportedly extending beyond farmers to nurses facing rural hospital closures, teachers, and retirees.

The case for her: She’s a genuine first-time candidate with a story that’s hard to fake: she actually lost the thing she’s campaigning about. Arkansas political observers have noted she may have the best shot at a Senate win for a Democrat in the state since 2010, largely because her outsider, anti-establishment framing doesn’t read as partisan to rural voters.

The case against her: She has zero political or governing experience, which Cotton’s campaign will use relentlessly in contrast to the experience of a sitting three-term senator. She’s also drawn criticism from conservative outlets over past comments supporting race-based hiring and admissions policies, made before her Senate run, that sit awkwardly next to her “fairness for everyone” message. Cotton starts with a massive fundraising advantage, and no Arkansas Democrat has won a Senate seat since 2008.

Jamie Davis, Louisiana (D) vs. Rep. Julia Letlow (R)

Davis is a third-generation farmer from Waterproof, in Tensas Parish, running more than 2,000 acres of sorghum, corn, soybeans, and cotton, some of it on land his grandfather once worked as a sharecropper. He served four years as a Tensas Parish police juror before this run. He’s the Democratic nominee for the seat vacated by Bill Cassidy, who became the first sitting U.S. senator in over a decade to lose renomination, largely fallout from his vote to convict Trump after January 6.

What he’s saying: Davis frames his campaign around basic affordability: healthcare access, Medicaid protection, drug pricing, and public education. He’s careful to keep the tone practical rather than combative, positioning himself as a problem-solver rather than an ideologue in a state where that label can be fatal for a Democrat. In direct campaign outreach, he leans on the arc from a grandfather who picked cotton on land he’d never own to a grandson who could become the state’s first Black U.S. senator, and he’s openly critical of Governor Jeff Landry’s decision to suspend a congressional race after its redrawn map was ruled unconstitutional, calling it a personal affront and a power grab.

What’s new: Not much has shifted in the horse race itself. Forecasters still put Letlow’s odds of holding the seat above 90 percent, and she carries Trump’s endorsement in a state he won by 22 points. Davis’s fundraising has picked up, however, with roughly $1.6 million raised in the most recent quarter, a genuinely strong number for a first-time Delta candidate even if it’s dwarfed by Letlow’s war chest.

The case for him: He cleared his own primary field decisively, beating his closest rival roughly 80 to 20 percent, and his win made him the first Black candidate to advance to a general election for a Louisiana U.S. Senate seat since Reconstruction, a milestone confirmed by multiple outlets covering the race, not just campaign messaging. His personal story, multigenerational farming on land tied to his family’s history as sharecroppers, gives him an authenticity that’s difficult to manufacture.

The case against him: No Louisiana Democrat has won a Senate seat in 18 years, and Letlow enters with Trump’s endorsement in a state Trump carried comfortably. Davis also has far less name recognition and campaign infrastructure than Letlow, who’s already a sitting member of Congress.

Jamie Ager, North Carolina’s 11th District (D) vs. Rep. Jennifer Balkcom (R)

Ager is a fourth-generation farmer from Fairview, outside Asheville, who built his family’s Hickory Nut Gap Farm into a sustainable meat company employing 25 people and working with dozens of regional producers. There’s a family public-service thread here too: his grandfather served in the NC House, Senate, and Congress in the 1980s, and his father and brother have both held state office, though Ager is explicit that he’s not running on any dynastic claim.

What he’s saying: Ager’s pitch is bipartisan-flavored pragmatism: Hurricane Helene recovery funding, rural healthcare access, and using agriculture policy as a place where left and right can actually agree. He’s been openly critical of what he sees as his own party’s tendency toward academic, scripted messaging that doesn’t land in rural districts.

What’s new: This race just changed opponents entirely. On August 5, incumbent Chuck Edwards abruptly withdrew from his reelection bid after the House Ethics Committee recommended his censure, following a report that found substantial reason to believe he violated House rules by creating a hostile workplace for two young female staffers, including gifts of jewelry, designer purses, and guns. Ager’s response was notably restrained rather than triumphant: “My heart goes out to the young women” who came to serve their community, he said, adding that regardless of who he faces, his message on Hurricane Helene recovery, lower costs, and ending corruption in Washington hasn’t changed. On August 10, local Republican leaders chose state Rep. Jennifer Balkcom, a two-term legislator, to replace Edwards on the ballot with under 90 days to go. Ager’s campaign has framed her as more of the same, with campaign manager Grayson Barnette saying flatly there’s no difference between her and the man she’s replacing.

The case for him: He outraised Edwards more than three to one before the withdrawal, was named to the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” program, and entered the second quarter with nearly $2.2 million cash on hand, a serious head start against a replacement candidate who now has less than three months to build a statewide profile from scratch.

The case against him: No Democrat has won this seat since it was redrawn in 2011, and it remains a Republican-leaning district even with an unconventional opponent switch this late in the race. Ager has never held elected office, and Balkcom, despite the late start, is a sitting state legislator with an existing base in Henderson County.

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Blake Gendebien, New York’s 21st District (D) vs. Anthony Constantino (R)

Gendebien is a second-generation dairy farmer from Lisbon, in St. Lawrence County, who runs Twin Mill Farms with roughly 500 head of cattle alongside his wife, Carmen. He’s served as vice chair of the cooperative board of Agri-Mark and has testified before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Commodities, Risk Management, and Trade. He and Carmen also founded a pediatric cancer support nonprofit, and he sits on the Lisbon Central School Board. This is his second run at the seat: party chairs picked him as their presumptive nominee for a special election that never happened after Elise Stefanik’s UN nomination was withdrawn, and he simply stayed on the trail through this cycle instead. He won his primary by more than 30 points.

What he’s saying: Gendebien’s pitch is corruption and dysfunction in Washington rather than a purely ideological message: he’s proposed banning members of Congress from trading stocks, and he frequently notes the North Country has lost more than 700 dairy farms in six years. “Not enough of the people who are supposed to be representing us in Washington have calluses on their hands,” is how his campaign puts it. He’s pushed for a non-seasonal guest worker program to address farm labor shortages he says are driving up grocery prices, and has said he’ll “run my campaign like my friends and neighbors actually behave in the North Country, with dignity and respect.” In direct campaign outreach, he grounds the whole case in his own routine, describing 3:30 a.m. wakeups to feed his herd through the snow and the hard calls required to keep a farm and its employees afloat, and frames the race explicitly as a chance to replace Stefanik with someone who actually lives in the district rather than a career politician using it to chase higher ambitions.

The case for him: He’s dramatically outraised his opponent, with $2.6 million cash on hand after the second quarter and contributions from more than 79,000 donors, and his own internal polling in late June showed him trailing Constantino by just one point, 45 to 44, in a district Republicans typically win comfortably. He’s been building this campaign for a year and a half, giving him far more institutional muscle than most first-time candidates.

The case against him: NY-21 remains one of the most Republican-leaning districts in New York, and his opponent, Sticker Mule CEO Anthony Constantino, carries Trump’s personal endorsement after a contested primary. A state elections board also ruled hundreds of Gendebien’s signatures invalid for a minor-party ballot line, costing him a second line on the ballot that could have mattered on the margins.

Maine: when the comeback story fell apart, then got interesting again

Graham Platner, an oyster farmer, Marine and Army veteran, and Sullivan planning board chair, won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary in June against Governor Janet Mills on a populist, anti-oligarchy message that had genuine grassroots energy behind it, including an endorsement from Bernie Sanders. Even before the primary, his campaign had absorbed a string of controversies: old Reddit posts, including comments about rape that read as minimizing, and a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol, which he said he got while drunk on leave and has apologized for.

Then, in early July, a former girlfriend publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2021. Platner denied the allegation as categorically false, but within days several of his prominent supporters withdrew their endorsements, and on July 8 he announced he would step aside, officially withdrawing on July 10.

What happened next was something Maine had never done before. Under state law, the Democratic Party had until July 27 to name a replacement nominee, and it did so through an emergency delegate convention rather than a new primary. On July 25, delegates gathered in Bangor and selected Troy Jackson, a former Maine Senate president and fifth-generation logger from Allagash, in a near-unanimous vote. Jackson isn’t a farmer, but he’s cut from similar rural, working-land cloth, and he’s campaigning on much the same economic populist message that made Platner popular in the first place.

What’s new: Jackson isn’t just staying competitive, he’s now leading. A Fox News poll conducted August 6 through 10 put him ahead of Collins 48 to 46, and a Hart Research poll for Senate Majority PAC around the same time had him up 49 to 45. A University of New Hampshire poll in late July found voters more concerned about Collins voting with Trump too often than about Jackson being too progressive. Betting markets have swung hard in his direction as well, with Polymarket giving him roughly 2-to-1 odds. Fox News’s own Political Power Rankings now list Maine as one of just four Senate toss-up states, alongside Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio, that could decide which party controls the chamber. It’s a genuinely remarkable turnaround for a party that had to replace its nominee three months before Election Day.

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The Republican side: a farmer beat a farmer, and Trump decided who won

Thomas Massie, who has represented Kentucky’s 4th District since 2012, is actually a farmer: he and his wife started a farm in Kentucky after selling their tech company, and he’s described in his own official biography as a business owner and farmer alongside his time as a judge-executive. He’s also spent years as one of the House’s most consistent contrarians, voting against his own party’s leadership on foreign aid, spending bills, and, most recently, pushing to force a vote on releasing files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

That independence cost him his seat. President Trump recruited and endorsed a primary challenger, Ed Gallrein, a fifth-generation Kentucky farmer and former Navy SEAL, explicitly to knock Massie out, telling reporters at one point that Massie “was a bad guy” who “deserves to lose.” Trump campaigned against Massie personally in the district, and on May 19, Gallrein beat him by roughly 10 points in what AdImpact tracked as the most expensive House primary in American history, with $32.6 million spent on advertising alone. It amounts to a literal farmer-versus-farmer Republican primary, decided almost entirely on loyalty to Trump rather than anything to do with agriculture policy, and it’s about as clean an illustration of McMahon’s argument as exists on the ballot this year: two men who actually farm, and the race came down to a culture-war loyalty test that had nothing to do with farming (or representing constituents) at all. Gallrein now heads into November as the heavy favorite in this deep-red district against Democrat Melissa Strange.

Three other Republican farmers tried and failed to reach the general election this cycle. Kyle Larsen, a hog and row-crop farmer and land appraiser from Humboldt, Iowa, ran on “faith, family, farm” for an open seat in Iowa’s 4th District, then dropped out early in the cycle, citing the toll the campaign was taking on his family and farm. Don Horn, a farmer in Grayson County, Texas, and Navy veteran, lost his primary to incumbent Pat Fallon, his second failed attempt at the seat. Steve Dowell and Abhiram Garapati, both farmers challenging twelve-term incumbent John Carter in Texas’s 31st District, lost to Carter, who had Trump’s endorsement locked up.

The Massie-Gallrein race adds a stranger fourth entry to that list: it’s not that Republican farmers can’t win primaries, it’s that when a farmer incumbent bucks Trump, the party will run another farmer against him, and Trump’s endorsement decides the outcome regardless of either person’s actual record on agriculture. David Valadao, a dairy farmer representing California’s 22nd District, remains the only Republican farmer currently holding a seat, and he’s a multi-term incumbent, not a first-timer.

The pattern is worth naming rather than smoothing over. Democratic operatives, including some of the same people who recruited Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, have been actively seeking out first-time farmers and blue-collar candidates this cycle as a deliberate strategy for winning back rural, populist-leaning voters who’ve drifted from the party. On the Republican side, farming credentials haven’t been the deciding factor in a single competitive primary this year. Loyalty to Trump has.

What this all means for the food supply

Farmers left elected office as farming became a specialized, corporate-dominated industry rather than something a lawmaker’s family did on the side. Congress’s incentives shifted from delivering results to generating viral outrage, and farm bills, bundled together with things like SNAP, became collateral damage in fights that have nothing to do with what’s good for agriculture. Meanwhile, a handful of companies consolidated control over seed, meat processing, and grain trade to the point that the free-market, deregulation instinct many farmers hold isn’t actually serving them anymore, because it’s the corporations that benefit most from an unregulated field.

This year’s crop of farmer-candidates, win or lose, is a direct response to that erasure. Whether any of them actually get elected matters less than whether their candidacies put farm policy back in front of voters who’ve had the luxury of not thinking about where their food comes from. Somebody has to be the one asking Congress the question McMahon poses about her own expertise: “Who am I? I’m not the person that government should be listening to in this regard. Farmers are the people that government should be listening to in this regard.”

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

This weekend, we celebrated 250 years of American independence with flags, fireworks, parades and all kinds of familiar (and cliché) language about freedom. Independence is one of our most enduring national ideas, usually told through politics, war and the right to govern ourselves.

But a country also has to sustain itself. It has to feed its people, maintain productive land, preserve essential knowledge, support functioning communities and withstand disruption. By those measures, American independence has always depended on farmers.

This is not a new idea or a sentimental one. Agriculture has been central to the country from its beginning. According to the USDA, in 1790, the year of the first U.S. Census, about 90 percent of the population was engaged in farming. Farmers fed households and towns, supplied armies and produced the raw materials of a growing economy. The practical knowledge of how to grow food, raise animals and work particular land under unpredictable conditions was spread across an enormous number of people and places.

That distribution mattered. Food production was not concentrated in a handful of companies, regions or supply chains. It rested in many hands.

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As the country grew, so did the number of farms. By 1850, the United States had nearly 1.45 million. The number peaked at 6.8 million in 1935. Today, according to the USDA, we have about 1.9 million farms left. In less than a century, America has lost roughly five million of them.

There are many reasons for that change. America urbanized. Mechanization reduced the need for farm labor. Transportation improved. Agricultural science advanced. Farmers became extraordinarily productive. The Green Revolution accelerated that transformation, bringing higher-yielding crop varieties together with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, expanded irrigation, larger machinery and increasingly specialized production. Farms could produce far more food with fewer people, but they also became more dependent on purchased inputs, fossil fuels, technology and capital. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, total U.S. farm output nearly tripled between 1948 and 2021. Fewer farmers became capable of producing far more food, an extraordinary achievement that also helped create the conditions for farms to grow larger, specialize further and consolidate.

That achievement is real. But it came with another change that deserves much more attention: food production moved into fewer hands.

According to the USDA Economic Research Service, between 1987 and 2017 the share of American cropland operated by midsize farms fell from 57 percent to 33 percent. During those same 30 years, the share operated by large farms with at least 2,000 acres rose from 15 percent to 41 percent.

This is where the question of independence becomes urgent. A food system can become more efficient and more productive while also becoming more concentrated and therefore more vulnerable. Those things can happen at the same time. And concentration can reduce the number of people, places and pathways available when conditions change.

Small farmers keep food production in more hands. That may be one of their most important contributions to our independence, because a country with many independent producers has more people making decisions, solving problems and responding to local conditions. Knowledge is distributed rather than centralized. Capacity exists in more places. A disruption in one part of the system does not necessarily eliminate every other way to grow, sell or move food.

Small farmers also keep food closer to home. They sell through farmers markets, farm stands, CSAs, local stores, restaurants, schools and direct relationships with customers. These channels are small compared with the national food system, but that does not make them insignificant. Shorter supply chains create additional ways for food to move, and the value of those additional pathways becomes clearest when larger systems are under stress.

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We saw that during the pandemic. As parts of the conventional food system struggled with processing bottlenecks, institutional closures and abrupt shifts in demand, small farmers across the country changed how they sold food. They built online stores, packed boxes, created pickup sites, expanded direct sales and delivered to customers. They did not replace the national food system, nor could they. What they demonstrated was the value of having capacity outside a single dominant channel.

Small farmers keep land in production too, and this is increasingly important. According to American Farmland Trust, between 2001 and 2016 the United States lost or compromised about 2,000 acres of farmland and ranchland every day to development and other non-agricultural uses. Once productive land is paved, subdivided or permanently converted, rebuilding that agricultural capacity is extraordinarily difficult.

A working small farm can be the reason land remains farmland. It can also be the bridge between one generation of farmers and the next. That matters at a time when, according to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the average American farmer is 58.1 years old and access to land and capital remains a formidable barrier for new farmers.

The loss of a farm is therefore not simply the loss of a business. It can mean the loss of productive land and the loss of accumulated knowledge about how to farm it.

Farming knowledge is intensely local. A farmer learns where water settles after a hard rain and which field dries first in spring. They learn which variety can tolerate a humid summer, which pasture needs more recovery time, which animal thrives in a particular climate and which crop can find a market close enough to make growing it worthwhile. They learn how weather, soil, labor, infrastructure and markets interact in one specific place.

That knowledge takes years to build and is not easily replaced. A nation that loses farmers loses people who know how to produce food. A nation that loses farms loses some of the places where that knowledge is practiced and passed forward.

Small farmers also protect diversity within the food system. They grow different crops and varieties, raise different breeds, work at different scales and use different methods. They sell into different markets and respond to different communities. This matters because resilience depends in part on having options. Climate changes. Markets shift. Pests move. Consumer needs evolve. A system with many producers making independent decisions has more opportunities to test, adapt and respond.

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The same principle applies to local economies. Small farms buy supplies, hire workers and use mechanics, veterinarians, feed stores, processors, truckers and other local businesses. They sell at markets and to restaurants. They may host school groups, donate food, collaborate with neighboring farms or help sustain a processor whose existence makes other farms possible. Money spent locally can continue circulating locally, but the relationships themselves are just as important. They create a network of people and businesses with the ability to solve problems together.

This is how farms help keep communities alive, particularly in rural places where the disappearance of one business can weaken several others. A dairy closes and a local hauler loses volume. Several livestock farms disappear and a processor can no longer stay open. A farmers market loses vendors and draws fewer customers. A feed store closes, making it harder and more expensive for the farms that remain. These losses compound. One piece of local food infrastructure often depends on the existence of the others.

We are already seeing the larger pattern. According to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, the United States lost 141,733 farms in just five years, a 7 percent decline. The number of American farms fell below two million for the first time since before the Civil War.

The issue is not that every farm of the past should have survived or that large-scale agriculture has no place in feeding a country of more than 340 million people. We need productive farms of many sizes, and the extraordinary gains in American agricultural productivity should not be dismissed.

The issue is what happens when efficiency becomes concentration, and concentration steadily replaces diversity, local capacity and independent decision-making.

A system dominated by fewer farms and fewer channels may produce enormous quantities of food. It may move that food with remarkable speed and efficiency. But scale is not the same as strength. When production, processing or distribution becomes concentrated, a disruption at one point can travel much further. When local infrastructure disappears, communities have fewer alternatives. When fewer people know how to farm, agricultural knowledge becomes thinner. When farmland leaves production, capacity is not waiting on a shelf to be switched back on when we need it.

This is why the role of small farmers in American independence is not merely historical. They continue to keep food production in more hands, food closer to home and land in production. They preserve agricultural knowledge and diversity. They strengthen local economies, create alternatives when larger systems fail, adapt to changing conditions and help keep communities functioning.

For more than 250 years, those contributions have helped build and sustain this country. We should be deeply concerned that we are now losing many of the farms that still provide them.

This is the work of the For Farmers Movement. We invest directly in small farmers across the country, in the projects they tell us will help them continue, adapt and endure. Sometimes that is fencing or irrigation. Sometimes it is a cooler, a wash-pack space, equipment, animal housing or infrastructure that makes a farm more resilient and the work more possible.

We do this because small farmers are not a charming remnant of America’s past. Their value is not symbolic, and their importance did not end when farming became more mechanized, more productive or more consolidated.

Our independence has rested on farmers’ backs for more than 250 years. The question now is how much of that independence we are willing to lose.

For farmers. For our future.

Join us.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

The agency inspects our food, funds school lunches, administers SNAP, supports rural communities, manages conservation programs, and helps shape the economics of farming in America. Yet when people talk about the USDA, the conversation often gets reduced to one simple idea: farmers get subsidies.

The reality is much more complicated.

In this week’s episode of One Bite Is Everything, I take a step back and ask a basic question: What is the USDA, really? Who does it serve? And why do some farmers have safety nets while others seem to fall through the cracks? Along the way, we explore how a department created by Abraham Lincoln to serve farmers evolved into one of the largest federal agencies in the country, and why recent changes matter whether you live on a farm or in a city apartment.

If you’ve ever wondered how food policy actually works, this is the place to start. Listen here.

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Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

We ended with a question: if it hasn’t delivered what it promised, why are we doing more of it?

The answer is politics and money. What else is new?

The core Corn Belt states — Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and South Dakota — hold 22 Senate seats, nearly a quarter of the entire chamber. Iowa, the nation’s largest ethanol-producing state, has hosted the first presidential nominating contest for both parties since 1972. For decades, supporting the ethanol mandate has been a non-negotiable entry fee for any serious presidential candidate. In 2008, Barack Obama declared ethanol production essential to national security. John McCain, on the record opposing ethanol subsidies, simply skipped Iowa entirely. The Iowa Renewable Fuel Association’s own executive director put it plainly: Iowa gives corn growers a powerful tool to promote renewable fuels policy to presidential candidates. (PBS NewsHour; E&E News; Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future)

No serious presidential candidate campaigns against it. No serious senator from a corn state votes against it. The mandate is not an energy policy. It is a political protection racket for a crop with powerful friends in Washington, and it has been running for 50 years.

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What Is E15 and Why Is Everyone Fighting About It

E15 is gasoline blended with 15% ethanol instead of the standard 10%. It is marketed at the pump as Unleaded 88. Most people have never heard of it. In Washington right now it is one of the most fought-over pieces of energy and agriculture policy on the table.

Here is why. EPA regulations have historically blocked the higher blend rate during summer months, from June 1 through September 15, because of outdated volatility rules under the Clean Air Act. Higher ethanol blends evaporate faster in heat, which under old standards could contribute to smog formation. The summertime ban has been a running frustration for corn growers and ethanol producers for years.

The House passed legislation for year-round E15 sales in 2026. It now awaits a Senate vote. The Trump administration has backed it through executive action and emergency waivers, framing it as both an energy independence measure and a relief valve for corn farmers facing collapsed export markets. (House of Representatives; EPA; Trump Executive Order 14156, January 2025)

If E15 goes nationwide year-round, it would require an additional 2.4 billion bushels of corn annually. That is a lot of new demand for a crop whose prices have been falling and whose largest export customer, China, has largely stopped buying American grain. (American Farm Bureau Federation; National Corn Growers Association)

Who wins: large-scale commodity corn growers and ethanol producers, who get a guaranteed domestic demand boost to replace lost export markets.

Who doesn’t win? Consumers, because more ethanol per gallon means less energy per gallon, meaning you fill up more often. And small farms, diversified producers, and vegetable growers, because they do not grow commodity corn. They get none of the upside and all of the downstream costs, including higher land prices driven by corn economics and higher fertilizer costs when energy markets spike. (Taxpayers for Common Sense; World Resources Institute)

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The Iran War, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Fertilizer Paradox

Here is where the story gets genuinely current and genuinely complicated.

U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran began in February 2026. By March 4, Iranian forces had declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, threatening and carrying out attacks on ships attempting to transit it. The Strait is the narrow chokepoint through which approximately 20% of the world’s traded oil and significant volumes of liquefied natural gas flow. The International Energy Agency characterized the resulting disruption as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Crude oil surged from roughly $70 per barrel to over $110, the highest level since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. (Congressional Research Service, March 2026; Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, April 2026)

High oil prices make ethanol more attractive as a domestic fuel alternative. When crude is expensive, corn-based fuel looks like a bargain and ethanol demand goes up. Corn futures hit a nine-month high in March 2026 on exactly that logic, climbing toward $4.60 per bushel as traders priced in stronger biofuel demand. The administration pointed to E15 as a domestic energy solution. (Trading Economics, March 2026)

But here is another problem: nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, which flows through the same disrupted global energy markets. The Strait of Hormuz closure drove nitrogen fertilizer prices up more than 30%, arriving at the worst possible time for spring planting. Despite claims by the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, that 80% of farmers had purchased this year’s fertilizer last year, it is simply not true. Fertilizer is challenging to store for that long. Farmers begin shopping for fertilizers in the early spring of the year they intend to apply it to their crops.

So growing more corn for ethanol just got significantly more expensive. The same conflict that makes ethanol more attractive as a fuel alternative makes it more costly to produce as a crop. (Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, April 2026)

The administration is simultaneously arguing that we need more domestic corn ethanol because of the energy crisis, while the energy crisis is making it dramatically more expensive to grow the corn that ethanol requires.

And the small farms in For Farmers Movement’s dataset, who were not growing commodity corn in the first place, are absorbing higher fertilizer and fuel costs with none of the upside from the ethanol demand surge.

Theory: We Grow So Much Corn We Need Places to Hide It

The U.S. had nearly 1.76 billion bushels of unused corn sitting in storage as of September 2024. Corn prices have been falling. Farmers received on average 30% less for their corn in the 2023-24 crop year than the year before, with another projected 10% decline in 2024-25. We grow more corn than the world can naturally absorb. (USDA WASDE Report, January 2025)

So what do you do with it?

You put it in the middle aisles of the grocery store. High fructose corn syrup in your soda, your bread, your salad dressing, your ketchup. Corn starch. Corn-derived ingredients in nearly every processed food product on the shelf. You feed it to livestock at industrial scale. You export what you can to whoever will buy it, which is getting harder as trade relationships fray. And you burn it in your gas tank.

Ethanol is not primarily an energy policy. It is a corn disposal policy dressed up as energy independence. The mandate exists to guarantee a market for a crop we grow in quantities that exceed what the world can naturally absorb. ADM figured this out in 1974. Washington has been running with it ever since. (Taxpayers for Common Sense; Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future)

What if we grew something else?

What if even a fraction of those 98.7 million acres of corn were in vegetables, legumes, diversified crops, or managed grassland? What if the federal policy infrastructure that has spent 50 years guaranteeing a market for corn had spent even a portion of that time and money building markets for the food people actually want to eat?

We will never know, because the mandate goes the other direction. And it is about to get stronger.

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What This Means for Small Farms

The ethanol mandate did something specific to the American farm landscape that rarely gets discussed in the context of energy policy.

By guaranteeing a market for commodity corn and anchoring federal subsidy structures around it, the mandate drove up corn acreage, drove up land prices, and concentrated federal resources around the operations growing commodity crops at scale. Land that might have supported diversified small farming became more valuable as corn ground. The economics of corn, propped up by mandates and subsidies, crowded out the economics of everything else.

The farms in For Farmers Movement’s dataset do not grow commodity corn. They grow vegetables, raise pastured animals, run diversified operations, sell direct to consumers and restaurants and farmers markets. They do not benefit from the ethanol mandate. They do not qualify for the price floors that trigger emergency payments when corn prices fall. They are competing for land in a market where corn economics have driven prices to record highs, making it harder and more expensive for the next generation of farmers to get on the land at all.

Meanwhile the programs that were building markets for their kind of farming, Local Food for Schools, Climate-Smart Commodities, the Land Access program, were cut in 2025 and 2026. The programs that built and sustained the corn and ethanol infrastructure, blending mandates, tax credits, guaranteed markets, production subsidies, have been running for 50 years and are getting stronger.

It is not that small farms lost a fair fight. They were never in the same fight. The rules were written for a different game entirely. (USDA; Taxpayers for Common Sense; For Farmers Movement grant data)

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It all started with one little sticker on my gas pump!

The next time you stand at a gas pump and see those words, Contains 10% Ethanol, you will know what they mean.

They mean 98.7 million acres of corn. They mean 195 pounds of fertilizer per acre running into the Mississippi every spring. They mean a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and a $7 billion annual cleanup bill. They mean 50 years of subsidies that never delivered the energy independence they promised. They mean ADM found a place to put its byproduct in 1974 and convinced the federal government to mandate that you use it ever since.

And they mean that while we have been burning corn in our gas tanks, the farms that grow the food you actually recognize, the diversified, the regional, the small, have been doing it without a mandate, without a price floor, without 50 years of guaranteed markets.

They have been doing it because they believe in it. Because it’s important.

Next week I am going to pick something simpler. I thought this would be simpler. It was a lot, but I am glad I did it. It’s important for us to understand and I have been thinking about it for a while. It’s amazing that our gas tank ripples into our refrigerators and so much more just from thinking about a little sticker and the corn behind it.

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Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized — that starts with one little thought, fact, idea, or question and unfurls the details behind it — and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

In this week’s episode of One Bite is Everything, I sit down with chef and educator Gary Podesto of Climate Farm School, an organization that brings people onto working farms to learn directly from farmers about soil, food systems, regenerative agriculture, and the realities of producing food in today’s world. What begins as an educational experience often becomes something much deeper: a chance to reconnect with the people, places, and processes that sustain us.

Farms may be one of the few places left where we can still experience direct cause and effect. Weather impacts crops. Soil impacts nutrition. Human care impacts outcomes. And when we understand those connections, we begin to see that food is never just food. It’s connected to our health, our communities, our environment, and our economy.

Hit play. Meet Gary. Take your first class.

I wonder if you’ve noticed it, questioned it, and if you have questions about it too. Or if it’s just background noise as you fill up your gas tank?

Well, I think you’re curious too. And I did the work to connect some of the dots from your gas tank (the small bite) to the whole story (in two parts).

Because what’s in your gas tank is also what’s in your farm policy, your food prices, your Gulf of Mexico, and your tax bill. And once you understand the full chain, from the cornfield to the pump to the dead zone in the Gulf, you will never look at that little white sticker the same way again.

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How It’s Made

Ethanol is alcohol. The same basic process that makes beer or whiskey makes fuel ethanol, just optimized for volume and stripped of anything you’d want to drink.

Corn kernels are ground into a fine meal, mixed with water and enzymes that break down the starch into sugars, then fermented with yeast that converts those sugars into alcohol. The resulting liquid is distilled, heated until the alcohol vaporizes, then condensed back into liquid form, to separate the ethanol from the water. What’s left over after distillation is called distillers grains, a protein-rich byproduct that gets sold as livestock feed.

One bushel of corn produces roughly 2.8 gallons of ethanol.

About 200 ethanol plants across the country run this process continuously, consuming roughly one third of the entire U.S. corn crop every single year. That is not a small side industry. That is a federal mandate consuming a third of the most abundantly grown crop in America. (USDA; Renewable Fuels Association)

Why Corn? And Why So Much of It?

U.S. farmers planted 98.7 million acres of corn in 2025, the highest acreage since 1935. The 2025 crop was a record 17 billion bushels, at a record yield of 186.5 bushels per acre. Of that, 5.6 billion bushels went to ethanol. (USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, January 2026)

Corn became the feedstock of choice for ethanol not because it was the most efficient or environmentally sound option. It became the feedstock because it was abundant, because the infrastructure to process it already existed, and because the people who grew it had powerful friends in Washington.

The Renewable Fuel Standard, first passed in 2005 and dramatically expanded in 2007, created a guaranteed federal market by mandating ethanol blending into gasoline. That mandate, not consumer demand, is what drives the scale. Nobody chose this at the pump. It was chosen for us. (Renewable Fuels Association; North Dakota State University)

The Political History: Nixon, ADM, and 50 Years of Subsidies

This is not an FDR story, although a lot of our current farm subsidies originate in the New Deal era (and have changed very little since). It is not even a Jimmy Carter story, though Carter gets partial credit. The modern corn ethanol subsidy era begins in 1974, not with a government initiative but with a corporate problem.

Archer Daniels Midland, the agricultural giant behind high fructose corn syrup, found itself with excess ethanol as a byproduct of its wet milling process. ADM needed a market for it. Capitalizing on Nixon’s Project Independence initiative, designed to achieve total energy independence from foreign sources in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, ADM launched a political and publicity campaign promoting ethanol as a gasoline additive. The current ethanol industry was not born out of a national energy strategy but out of a corporation’s need to find a use for its waste. (Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future)

The campaign made four promises: energy independence from foreign oil, lower greenhouse gas emissions, economic benefits for rural America, and a bridge to next-generation biofuels from non-food sources like switchgrass and agricultural waste.

The first direct subsidy came in 1975, a 4-cents-per-gallon tax break on gasoline blended with 10% ethanol. Reagan expanded subsidies aggressively in the early 1980s, raising the subsidy to 50 cents per gallon and adding price guarantees and purchase agreements. The 2005 Renewable Fuel Standard created a guaranteed federal market. The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act required 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel annually by 2022, with only 15 billion allowed from corn, the rest supposed to come from next-generation cellulose sources.

That next-generation piece never materialized at scale. The bridge was supposed to be temporary. Fifty years later, it is still here. And the destination it was supposed to lead to never arrived.

Taxpayers have spent tens of billions of dollars over the past 50 years propping up what is now a mature industry that still cannot stand on its own. Recent legislative changes enacted in 2025 revived and extended federal support rather than phasing it out. (Taxpayers for Common Sense, February 2026; Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future)

The Fertilizer Chain: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium… and the Gulf

Here is where the story gets environmental and expensive.

Corn cannot grow without fertilizer. This is not a small distinction. Unlike soybeans, which form symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria to obtain nitrogen naturally from the atmosphere, corn is completely dependent on available nitrogen in the soil. It requires approximately 195 pounds of fertilizer per acre, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium applied at scale across tens of millions of acres every growing season. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Planet Natural)

Here is what happens to that fertilizer. Every spring, nitrogen-rich runoff from farms across the Mississippi River basin washes into local rivers and streams. It travels through the tributaries, the Ohio, the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Tennessee, and eventually flows down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the nitrogen feeds explosive algae blooms. When the algae die, they sink to the ocean floor and decompose, stripping the water of oxygen in the process.

The result is the Gulf of Mexico dead zone: an oxygen-depleted area roughly the size of New Jersey where fish, shellfish, and other marine life cannot survive. Scientists have been warning about it for decades. Scaling up corn production to meet ethanol mandates would increase nitrogen loading in the dead zone by 10 to 18%, pushing nitrogen levels to twice the level recommended by the Mississippi Basin/Gulf of Mexico Water Nutrient Task Force. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008; NOAA; Sierra Club)

The dead zone costs an estimated $2.4 billion annually in disrupted fisheries and damaged marine habitat. Fixing it, reaching the EPA’s goal of a 45% reduction in nitrogen runoff from the Mississippi River basin, would cost an estimated $7 billion per year. That cleanup bill also lands on taxpayers. Meanwhile taxpayer-funded corn subsidies outspend water quality and conservation programs by more than 500 to 1. (Environmental Working Group; Louisiana Illuminator, February 2025)

The full taxpayer loop looks like this: we subsidize corn production. Corn requires heavy nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen runs into the Gulf. The dead zone grows. We spend billions trying to clean it up. Then we subsidize more corn.

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What Ethanol Is Supposed to Do for Your Fuel

Three promises were made when ethanol was introduced as a gasoline additive: energy independence from foreign oil, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and a bridge to next-generation biofuels.

Here is what ethanol actually does to your fuel. Blending ethanol with gasoline oxygenates the mixture, which burns more completely and produces less carbon monoxide. It displaces the most harmful gasoline components, sulfur, benzene, toluene, and xylene, that contribute to smog and poor air quality. On those narrow measures, ethanol is a genuine improvement over pure gasoline. It burns cleaner at the tailpipe. (Renewable Fuels Association; EBSCO Research Starters)

Here is what it does not do. Ethanol contains about two-thirds the energy of gasoline by volume. That means your car travels less far on a gallon of E10 than on a gallon of pure gasoline. You are burning more fuel to go the same distance. The gallon is cheaper at the pump, typically 10 to 30 cents less than regular gasoline, but that price reflects decades of mandates and subsidies that have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. The savings at the pump were already paid for by you. And because you burn through it faster, those savings can disappear before you reach your destination. (American Farm Bureau Federation; EBSCO Research Starters)

Is It Actually Cleaner? The Contested Ground

This is where the argument gets genuinely complicated, and where you have to hold two things at once.

The ethanol industry says corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 52% compared to gasoline when you account for the full lifecycle, including the carbon absorbed by growing corn. The corn plant pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it grows, which the industry counts as an offset against the carbon released when the ethanol burns. On paper, this math works. (Renewable Fuels Association; U.S. Department of Energy)

Independent researchers tell a more contested story. A landmark peer-reviewed study found that corn ethanol expansion between 2008 and 2016 may generate lifecycle emissions comparable to or worse than gasoline once you account for land use changes, converting grassland, wetlands, or other crops to corn to meet ethanol demand releases stored carbon that took decades to accumulate. The carbon offset from growing corn shrinks or disappears entirely when the full picture is counted. Nationwide annual fertilizer use surged 3 to 8% and water pollutants rose 3 to 5% as a direct result of corn expansion driven by ethanol mandates. (PNAS, 2022; Civil Eats)

The bottom line: ethanol burns cleaner at the tailpipe. Whether it is cleaner for the planet depends entirely on what you count, and who is doing the counting.

The Question That Pulls You Into Part Two

So here is where we are after 50 years of corn ethanol policy.

We have 98.7 million acres of corn. We have a dead zone the size of New Jersey. We have tens of billions in subsidies that haven’t delivered energy independence. We have a next-generation biofuel promise that never arrived. We have a cleanup bill that keeps growing. And we have a federal mandate that guarantees a market for a third of the corn we grow.

If it hasn’t delivered what it promised, why are we doing more of it?

That is the question Part Two answers. And the answer involves a war in the Persian Gulf, a chokepoint called the Strait of Hormuz, and a theory about where we hide our surplus corn. Part Two also addresses the cost part of the equation no one thinks about: the small farms that have been paying the price for all of it without ever seeing a dime of the benefit.

Part Two publishes next week. Any questions you want me to address there?

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

When she and I first spoke in the spring of 2025, Congress was still negotiating. SNAP felt threatened but not yet dismantled. By July 3rd of that year, HR One passed, and $200 billion in cuts to SNAP benefits became law. Rachel came back to make sure we understood what that actually means.

Here is one thing that stuck with me: three quarters of New York families surveyed by No Kid Hungry said they are making trade-offs right now between food and other basic needs. Not in theory. Actually doing it. A single parent told them she took on two additional part-time jobs and is still buying rice instead of protein. Another person is borrowing against their 401k to pay for groceries. Someone else is hiding canned beans in a closet so there is food for the children at the end of the month when benefits run out.

These are not edge cases. This is the survey data.

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One of the things Rachel made plain in this conversation is that SNAP is not just a food program. It is economic infrastructure. When SNAP benefits went out late during the November government shutdown, some New York City grocery stores reported that 70% of their monthly revenue had evaporated. Truckers, packaging facilities, farmers’ markets, local farms - the ripple goes a long way.

And yet SNAP is routinely talked about as though it is a handout to people who are not trying hard enough. Rachel mentioned a recent poll showing SNAP recipients actually skew healthier on their grocery receipts than non-recipients. She talked about how undocumented individuals are not eligible. She laid out exactly how much paperwork, recertification, and documentation is required to stay in the program.

We also talked about MAHA. It is genuinely hard to reconcile “make America healthy again” with cutting the purchasing power people need to buy fresh produce. If someone’s SNAP benefit shrinks, the first things to go are berries, protein, vegetables. What stays is rice and shelf stable calories. Rachel has ulcerative colitis. She knows firsthand that “healthy eating” is not one-size-fits-all, and that choice requires resources.

The part of the conversation that I keep returning to is this: hunger consumes mental bandwidth. Families are not just going without food. They are constantly calculating, rationing, hiding, planning for shortfall. That cognitive load has a cost. Energy spent on survival is energy not going into work, parenting, health, or building anything for the future.

Listen to the episode. Then call your representatives.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

This week on One Bite is Everything, I sat down with Chef Chris Stam of Alchemy on Martha’s Vineyard. Chris came up through some of the most demanding kitchens in the country, including Spice Market and the restaurant groups of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud, before unexpectedly landing on Martha’s Vineyard and eventually becoming both chef and partner at Alchemy. What struck me most about this conversation was how much great restaurants and great farms actually have in common. Both are built on discipline, consistency, mentorship, systems, adaptation, and an almost relentless commitment to quality under pressure.

We also talked about Chris’s relationship with farmer Jo Douglas of Fork to Pork, whose farm collects vegetable scraps from local restaurants to feed pigs that eventually return to restaurant menus — a small but powerful example of a local food system functioning as an ecosystem instead of a transaction. And honestly, that’s what this episode became for me: a reminder that every plate of food carries far more people, labor, land, and intention behind it than most of us ever stop to consider.

Strawberries at the beginning of their natural season can taste almost improbably good. Sweet but also bright. Soft but not mushy. Fragrant enough that you can smell them before the box is open.

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In my own garden, I grow strawberries small enough to rest on the tip of my thumb. When I have collected twenty or so, we eat them slowly, as if they were rare truffles foraged in some remote place. The flavor is concentrated in a way that makes supermarket strawberries feel like an entirely different fruit.

Contrast that with the strawberries commonly found in grocery stores, often large, visually perfect, and firm enough to travel long distances without bruising. Their texture can be surprisingly sponge-like, their flavor muted. It is not unusual to see them dipped in chocolate or layered into desserts that rely on added sweetness to supply what the fruit itself sometimes does not.

Betsy Zarko, a farmer outside Chicago who appeared on the podcast, once described her children’s reaction when they tasted out-of-season grocery store strawberries after growing accustomed to local berries. They were surprised that something that looked so appealing could taste so flat.

Americans eat roughly eight pounds of strawberries per person each year, and about 94 percent of households purchase them, making strawberries one of the most widely consumed fruits in the country. Roughly 85 to 90 percent of strawberries eaten in the United States are grown in California, often in highly concentrated production regions along the central coast. Florida produces most domestic winter strawberries, and Mexico supplies a growing share of imports, helping keep strawberries available throughout most of the year.

Year-round availability reflects both consumer demand and agricultural innovation. Strawberries were once primarily a late spring crop, but plant breeding programs have developed varieties that fruit under different daylight conditions. Traditional June-bearing strawberries produce one concentrated harvest each year, often associated with peak flavor. Day-neutral varieties, by contrast, are capable of producing fruit across a longer season, sometimes from spring through fall, allowing growers to supply markets more continuously.

Growing systems have evolved as well. Many commercial strawberries are grown using plasticulture, a method in which plants are placed in raised beds covered with plastic mulch that helps regulate soil temperature, suppress weeds, and conserve moisture. Drip irrigation delivers water and nutrients directly to plant roots, allowing farmers to manage growing conditions more precisely. These systems can improve yields and extend the harvest window, but they also encourage varieties that perform consistently within controlled production environments.

Strawberries are delicate, highly perishable, and easily damaged during transport. As a result, breeding programs often prioritize firmness, uniform size, disease resistance, and shelf life alongside flavor. Larger berries tend to contain more water relative to flavor compounds, which can dilute intensity. Smaller berries frequently concentrate sugars and aromatic compounds more densely, especially when allowed to ripen fully on the plant.

Companies such as Driscoll’s play a significant role in developing proprietary strawberry varieties that can perform reliably across multiple growing regions. Driscoll’s operates breeding programs focused on traits such as yield consistency, durability during shipping, visual uniformity, and predictable harvest timing. Their varieties are grown by licensed farmers in different climates, allowing strawberries to be supplied across much of the year.

Strawberries must still be harvested by hand to avoid bruising, making them one of the more labor-intensive fruit crops. California’s strawberry industry alone employs tens of thousands of seasonal workers during peak harvest periods, including workers participating in the H-2A visa program.

Because strawberries are susceptible to fungal diseases, soil pathogens, and insects, they are often managed intensively to maintain yields and reduce losses. Strawberries regularly appear on lists such as the Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen, which ranks produce by detectable pesticide residues. Residue levels are regulated, but the ranking reflects how much intervention is often required to produce consistent fruit at scale.

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I have occasionally tried premium imported strawberries from Japan and other countries, beautifully presented in protective packaging designed to prevent bruising. Individual berries can sell for extraordinary prices, sometimes more than twenty dollars per package. Even then, I have often found myself underwhelmed. Perfect appearance does not always translate into memorable flavor.

Flavor develops through sunlight, temperature variation, soil conditions, and time on the plant. A strawberry harvested early in order to travel farther may look identical to one picked fully ripe, but the eating experience can be very different.

The strawberries that sell out before 9 am at Union Square reflect a production model built around proximity and timing. The strawberries available year-round in supermarkets reflect a production model built around durability and distribution.

Both systems exist because they are solving for different problems.

Once you notice the difference, it becomes easier to ask why it exists. I, for one, prefer to wait for perfectly summer tasting strawberries, even if it means getting just a handful from my garden or getting to the market before 8 am. It’s worth the wait.

This is the idea behind Bite Sized. Start with something familiar. Follow the thread far enough to see what shaped it.

Because food looks simple, but it isn’t.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

In this week’s episode of One Bite is Everything, I pull back the curtain on the patterns hiding inside those applications — and what surprised me most. Again and again, farmers are asking for things like water systems, fencing, irrigation, coolers, rotational grazing infrastructure, and season extension. Not flashy projects. Operational bottlenecks. The hidden systems quietly holding local food together. The applications also reveal how many farmers are adapting to climate pressures in real time, even if they never describe it that way themselves.

What emerges is a much bigger story about resilience, infrastructure, and the fragile systems behind the food we eat every day. These applications reveal how much small farms are constantly solving, building, repairing, and adapting just to keep going — and how deeply local communities depend on work most people never see. If you’ve ever wondered what it actually takes to produce food right now in America, I think this episode will change the way you see it. Listen now to One Bite is Everything and learn more about the For Farmers Movement here.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

I didn’t drink it, but I did stand there wondering how milk had changed enough to become easier to digest and more concentrated in protein while still looking like ordinary milk.

Milk is one of the most familiar foods we have, which makes its quiet transformation easy to miss.

About 36 percent of Americans experience some degree of lactose malabsorption. Globally, roughly 65 to 70 percent of adults lose the ability to fully digest lactose after infancy. The ability to tolerate lactose into adulthood is largely genetic and varies by ancestry, with higher tolerance rates among people of Northern European descent and lower rates among many African, Asian, and Hispanic populations.

Lactose-free milk does not come from different cows. It is produced by adding the enzyme lactase after milking. Lactase breaks lactose, the primary sugar in milk, into glucose and galactose, two simpler sugars that are easier to digest. These smaller sugars also taste slightly sweeter, which is why lactose-free milk often tastes subtly sweeter even when no additional sugar has been added.

The higher protein content comes from a filtration process that changes the composition of the milk itself.

Fairlife uses ultra-filtration, a membrane-based technology that separates milk into its component parts. Milk is pushed through semipermeable membranes under pressure. Smaller molecules such as water, lactose, and some minerals pass through the membrane, while larger molecules such as proteins and fats remain. The separated components can then be recombined in different proportions.

Milk, in effect, becomes modular.

Instead of being a single ingredient, it becomes a set of adjustable parts.

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Conventional milk contains roughly 8 grams of protein per cup. Ultra-filtered milk often contains 12 to 14 grams per cup because some of the water and lactose have been removed, concentrating the remaining protein.

The protein itself still originates from the cow. The difference comes from how the milk is structured after it leaves the farm.

Milk composition does not begin at the processing plant. It begins with how cows are raised and fed. Protein levels are influenced by the balance of energy and amino acids in a cow’s diet, particularly lysine and methionine, as well as overall rumen health. Typical dairy rations often include combinations of corn silage, alfalfa hay, grain mixes, soybean meal, and mineral blends designed to support both milk volume and milk composition.

Farmers already monitor butterfat and protein levels closely because milk pricing formulas include component premiums. When processors are targeting specific nutritional profiles, that level of precision becomes even more important. What looks like a small change on a label often reflects thousands of small adjustments across biology, chemistry, and farm management.

When I interviewed Carter Williams, an investor focused on the intersection of food and health systems, on the One Bite is Everything podcast he described this type of product as an example of how the food industry changes when companies attempt to design around a specific outcome rather than simply producing a commodity.

Much of the modern food system operates horizontally. Farmers produce raw commodities like milk, corn, or wheat. Those commodities move through processors, ingredient companies, distributors, and brands. Each step is optimized for efficiency and consistency. The product becomes standardized long before it reaches the consumer.

Fairlife reorganized that structure by aligning the farm, the processing technology, and the brand around a specific nutritional profile: milk that is lactose-free, higher in protein, and consistent in taste.

Fairlife began as a partnership among dairy farmers seeking to differentiate milk through filtration technology. It is now majority owned by The Coca-Cola Company, a signal that milk is increasingly being positioned within the broader functional beverage category alongside protein drinks, recovery beverages, and other performance-oriented products.

Milk is no longer competing only with milk.

It is competing with protein shakes, nutrition bars, and drinks formulated for energy, recovery, and satiety.

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Protein demand has increased significantly over the past decade, influenced by fitness culture, aging population concerns about muscle maintenance, and growing awareness of how macronutrients affect blood sugar and hunger. Even though many Americans already consume adequate protein, the perception that more protein supports health has reshaped product development across the food industry.

We have seen this pattern before.

Greek yogurt represented less than 2 percent of yogurt sales in the United States twenty years ago. Today it accounts for more than half of the category. The shift was driven largely by demand for higher protein and thicker texture, which required changes in straining methods and processing techniques.

When consumer priorities change, processing often adapts first. Production practices follow.

Ultra-filtered milk may represent a similar repositioning of fluid milk within a changing nutritional landscape.

At the same time, other parts of the dairy sector are exploring digestibility from a different direction entirely. Some researchers and producers are examining differences in beta-casein protein structure associated with different cattle breeds, commonly referred to as A1 and A2 milk. Rather than altering milk through processing, this approach focuses on genetic variation within dairy herds.

We will come back to that in a future Bite.

For now, the chocolate milk in the refrigerator serves as a small signal of a larger adjustment taking place inside the food system. When consumer expectations change, even slightly, the system begins to reorganize around new outcomes. Processing technology evolves. Supply chains adapt. Farmers adjust herd management practices. Products begin to look the same on the shelf but function differently in the body.

The glass of milk itself has not changed very much.

The system behind it has.

This is the idea behind Bite Sized. Start with something familiar. Follow the thread just far enough to see what else is connected. Ask a few questions. Add a few facts. Stop before the complexity becomes overwhelming.

Because food looks simple, but it isn’t.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

Recently, I joined the New York and New Jersey Council for American Farmland Trust and participated in my first council meeting. What struck me immediately was how thoughtful and grounded the work felt. Not performative. Not abstract. Just people seriously trying to solve hard problems for farmers.

We visited an agrivoltaic site exploring how solar arrays can coexist with active farming in ways that actually benefit farms rather than replace them. We also toured a laboratory studying how different types of pests affect apple orchards and crops. Everywhere we went, the focus was the same: how do we protect farmland, support farmers, and build systems that make farming more viable for the next generation?

That’s what made my conversation with Emma Smalley feel especially important.

Emma is a first-generation goat farmer in New York who didn’t inherit land, generational knowledge, or a built-in farming network. She built her farm piece by piece after answering a Craigslist ad from an older farmer who needed help caring for his goats. What followed was mentorship, loss, years of searching for land, commuting hours to support the farm with an off-farm job, and learning how much modern farming depends on relationships and community.

One of the most powerful parts of our conversation was hearing Emma talk about isolation. Not just physical isolation, but the reality that many farmers today are trying to build businesses, care for land, and sustain themselves without the community structures that farming once relied on. Earlier generations often had neighbors farming nearby, family knowledge, and informal support systems built into daily life. Many farmers today have to intentionally create that community themselves.

And that’s where programs like Farmland for a New Generation New York matter. Coordinated by American Farmland Trust, the program helps connect farmland seekers with landowners, supports farm transitions, and provides guidance that can make the difference between someone staying in farming or giving up on the idea entirely.

Listening to Emma, and then seeing the work happening through American Farmland Trust, made something very clear: supporting farmers isn’t just about preserving land. It’s about rebuilding the infrastructure of support around the people trying to care for it.

Because farming doesn’t work in isolation. And neither do farmers.

Connect & Support

Learn more about the For Farmers Movement at For Farmers Movement

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Corn is planted on roughly 90 million acres in the United States each year, representing about one quarter of all planted cropland. Annual production reaches approximately 15 billion bushels, or more than 380 million metric tons. By comparison, most fruits and vegetables combined occupy only a small fraction of U.S. farmland.

Very little of this corn is eaten… directly.

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Roughly 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used to produce ethanol, a fuel additive blended into gasoline as part of national energy policy (we will get into this in a future piece, trust me). Another 35 to 40 percent becomes feed for livestock, including cattle, pigs, poultry, and farmed fish. The remaining portion is processed into ingredients used widely in packaged foods, including corn syrup, corn starch, corn oil, dextrose, and maltodextrin. Just head to the center aisles of your supermarket and flip any package to find corn hidden there.

Corn functions less as a vegetable and more as a foundational industrial input that moves through multiple sectors of the economy.

Livestock feed is one of the largest drivers of corn demand. A single feedlot steer may consume more than 50 bushels of corn over its lifetime, depending on the feeding system and finishing period. Large concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, depend on reliable supplies of uniform feed ingredients that can be transported and stored efficiently. Corn meets those requirements.

Ethanol demand is another major factor. Federal renewable fuel standards established in the early 2000s increased the volume of corn diverted toward fuel production. Ethanol now consumes billions of bushels of corn annually, linking agricultural land use directly to energy markets.

The structure of corn production today reflects a series of policy decisions that began accelerating after World War II, when the United States made increasing food production a national priority. Wartime fertilizer manufacturing capacity, originally built to produce explosives, was redirected toward synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, allowing farmers to grow crops more intensively. The USDA actively encouraged higher yields through research funding, extension programs, and price supports designed to stabilize farm income while increasing output.

In the 1970s, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz urged farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” signaling a shift toward maximizing production of commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Federal farm programs expanded crop insurance subsidies, disaster payments, and revenue protection tied primarily to these crops, reducing financial risk for large-scale monocropping systems. Today, corn receives a significant share of federal support through crop insurance premium subsidies, ethanol mandates under the Renewable Fuel Standard, and research investments focused on yield efficiency.

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Infrastructure followed policy. Grain elevators, rail lines, export terminals, and processing facilities were designed around crops that could be stored, standardized, and traded globally. Corn fit these requirements particularly well, reinforcing its role as a dominant use of American farmland.

Technological advances reinforced the trend. Hybrid seed development increased yields. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, produced using natural gas, allowed farmers to maintain productivity across large acreages. Mechanization reduced labor requirements and enabled fewer farmers to manage more land. Grain elevators, rail systems, export terminals, and processing facilities developed around crops that could be standardized and traded globally.

Once these systems were established, they created strong incentives to continue producing crops that fit efficiently within them.

Corn is well suited to this structure. It can be planted using highly specialized machinery across large acreages with relatively low labor requirements per acre. It stores well for long periods without significant loss of quality. It can be transported long distances. It can be processed into multiple products serving different markets. It can be fed to animals or converted into fuel.

The thing is, much of this corn is not grown because people need to eat more corn. It is grown because the system we built is designed to use it.

Last August I visited a farm in Minnesota and rode in a combine harvester as it moved through a field of corn. The machine harvested four rows at a time. Rotating blades pulled the tall plants inward, stripped the ears from the stalks, and fed them through the system, where kernels were separated and collected while the remaining plant material was returned to the field. Corn moved continuously through a chute that extended over the cab where I sat with the farmer’s daughter and the operator, who had been traveling from Mexico on an H-2A visa for more than twenty-five years to work the season.

Modern combines often cost between $400,000 and $800,000, with some models approaching $1 million depending on size and technology. Equipment of that scale influences planting decisions. The cost structure encourages maximizing acreage devoted to crops that can be harvested efficiently using specialized machinery.

This helps explain why corn and soybeans together occupy more than 170 million acres of American farmland.

Land used for commodity crops is land not used for other types of food production. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, and diversified crops that contribute directly to dietary health typically require different infrastructure, more labor per acre, and more complex distribution systems.

The current structure reflects economic logic as much as agronomy.

Corn supports livestock production systems that produce large volumes of meat, dairy, and eggs. Corn supports fuel markets. Corn supports processed food manufacturing. Corn supports export markets. Corn fits the existing system.

It means that large portions of American farmland are organized around fuel, animal feed, and industrial ingredients rather than food eaten directly by people.

Every summer I go to the Jersey Shore, where sweet corn appears briefly and tastes completely different from the commodity corn grown across much of the Midwest. I roast it and make a dish with corn, clams, and yellow Sungold tomatoes that I learned from Chef Molly Levine. It tastes like early August. It tastes like the small window of time when both tomatoes and corn are harvested at peak ripeness and eaten quickly.

That version of corn depends on seasonality, timing, and proximity. The other version depends on scale, storage, and processing. Both exist within the same agricultural system, but they operate very differently.

Understanding how corn came to occupy such a large share of American farmland helps explain why certain foods are abundant, why others are less available, and why supply chains function the way they do.

Corn is not simply pretty rows. You have to read between those rows. Beneath them is an infrastructure built over decades: federal subsidies tied to commodity crops, livestock systems designed around grain-based feed, ethanol markets shaped by energy policy, and supply chains optimized for uniform, storable inputs. These systems are deeply established and not easily changed. When you see corn, you are not only looking at a crop. You are looking at policy, economics, and a set of decisions that continue to shape what farmers grow and what we eat.

This is the idea behind Bite Sized. Start with something familiar. Follow the thread far enough to see what else it touches. What do we know? What are we missing? One bite at a time.

Because food looks simple, but it isn’t.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

One of the biggest things I couldn’t stop thinking about was this: the exact same “local” tomato can create a radically different outcome for a farmer depending on where you buy it. At a farmers market, that farmer may keep nearly all of the money. Somewhere else, they may see only a tiny fraction. And that’s before you even get into the reality that many people, including serious food lovers, don’t actually understand how farmers markets function, who runs them, or how fragile many of them really are.

This episode is for anyone who cares about food, local communities, flavor, small businesses, sustainability, or simply understanding the systems shaping everyday life. Honestly, even if you think you know farmers markets well, I suspect you’ll hear things in this conversation you’ve never thought about before.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

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At some point I realized that the package in my cabinet had been there a long time. Not days. More than a few weeks. Months. The muffins were still soft, still pale, still visually unchanged, tucked accidentally behind cans of beans and boxes of pasta.

Bakery bread does not behave this way. Fresh bread begins to change almost immediately after it cools. Moisture shifts outward. Its structure stiffens. Within a day or two, the only way to eat it is to toast it or to soak it in eggs and milk for French toast (my favorite). After that, it’s done.

The English muffins in my cabinent did not follow that timeline.

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So, what’s the rub?

The difference starts with wheat itself. Modern commodity wheat has been bred to produce consistent protein levels that behave predictably in large-scale baking systems. Commercial bakers need flour that hydrates the same way every time, forms gluten reliably, tolerates mechanical mixing, and produces uniform structure across thousands or millions of units. Wheat varieties are selected for performance traits such as gluten strength, yield per acre, disease resistance, and compatibility with mechanized harvest, storage, and milling systems.

Flavor is more difficult to standardize and is often not the primary driver of breeding decisions.

Most commercial flour is roller-milled, a process that separates the bran and germ from the endosperm. Removing the bran and germ reduces variability and extends shelf life because the oils contained in the germ can oxidize and become rancid. What remains is primarily starch and protein, a stable base that can be stored and transported efficiently. Many commercial flours are also enriched with iron and B vitamins to replace nutrients lost during milling.

From there, dough conditioners and preservatives help bread maintain a consistent texture for longer periods of time. Ingredients such as mono- and diglycerides act as emulsifiers that help keep the crumb structure soft. Enzymes modify starch behavior to slow the firming process commonly referred to as staling. Calcium propionate and sorbic acid inhibit mold growth, allowing packaged bread to remain visually fresh for extended periods under normal storage conditions.

This is what my English muffins had been subjected to before they made it to the back of my cabinet.

Packaging contributes as well. Plastic limits moisture loss and protects against environmental exposure that would otherwise accelerate spoilage. The result is bread engineered to maintain softness and resist visible change across longer supply chains and retail timelines.

These characteristics did not emerge randomly. They developed alongside a grain system designed for scale. Commodity wheat can move through large mills, into standardized flour streams, and onward to commercial bakeries producing enormous volumes of uniform products. Predictability reduces financial risk across the system. A bakery producing hundreds of thousands of English muffins each day cannot accommodate flour that behaves unpredictably from batch to batch.

Over time, these requirements influenced which wheat varieties were grown, which milling methods became dominant, and which functional additives became standard practice.

Bread became more consistent. It also became more shelf stable.

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The recent resurgence of sourdough reflects a growing interest in bread that behaves differently (and in the baker being connected to the process of making it). Sourdough fermentation relies on naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria that metabolize sugars more slowly than commercial yeast. Longer fermentation changes flavor and can influence texture and digestibility. It also produces bread that evolves more quickly over time, because it has not been designed to remain static.

My daughter maintains a sourdough starter in the refrigerator. I admire the dedication to feeding it, using it, keeping it alive. I also know that for me maintaining a starter is not currently compatible with mornings spent cleaning the barn, trimming goat hooves, and preparing garden beds for the growing season. Convenience has a role in every kitchen.

At the same time, a growing network of farmers, millers, maltsters, bakers, and researchers has been working to rebuild regional grain systems that prioritize flavor, adaptability, and economic resilience alongside performance. One of the leaders in this work is June Russell at the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming, who has spent years helping reconnect the pieces of a grain supply chain that had largely disappeared in many parts of the country.

For most of the 20th century, grain infrastructure consolidated into very large mills designed to handle standardized commodity wheat produced at national scale. Smaller regional mills closed. Locally adapted grain varieties fell out of use. Farmers lost nearby buyers. Bakers lost access to flour that reflected regional soil, climate, and growing conditions.

Rebuilding regional grain systems means rebuilding relationships as much as infrastructure. Farmers need varieties that perform well in their climate and soil. Millers need enough consistent volume to justify operating small and mid-scale mills. Bakers need flour that behaves well enough to work with, even if it is less uniform than commodity flour.

Some of the varieties being reintroduced include heritage grains such as Red Fife wheat, a 19th-century variety known for its flavor, and Turkey Red wheat, brought to the United States by Mennonite farmers in the 1870s and widely adapted to Plains growing conditions. These grains often produce flour with different protein structures and flavor profiles than modern commodity wheat. Bakers sometimes adjust hydration levels or fermentation time to work with them, because they behave differently in dough.

Researchers and seed stewards are also working with grains such as emmer, einkorn, and spelt, which can perform well under certain climate conditions and may require fewer inputs than highly bred modern wheat varieties. While yields are often lower, these grains can command higher value in regional markets where flavor and distinctiveness matter.

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The goal is not to eliminate large-scale grain production. It is to create a more balanced system in which some grain circulates closer to where it is grown, supporting regional economies and allowing greater diversity in the types of grain available to both bakers and eaters.

When flour reflects the place where it is grown, bread begins to taste like something again. And that pride in baking something real comes forward. It spills from the baker to the buyer and recirculates.

And when grain systems become more regionally distributed, farmers have more options for what they grow and where they sell it. That kind of flexibility can matter, especially when supply chains are disrupted or input costs change quickly.

The English muffins in my cabinet represent one end of the spectrum: flour designed to behave identically, and to last way longer than it should, regardless of where it was grown or milled.

The work June Russell and others are doing represents another: flour that reflects climate, soil, and regional knowledge, even if that means accepting more variability in how bread behaves.

Grain, like everything else in the food system, reflects the structure surrounding it.

Grain is not a neutral ingredient. Variety selection, soil conditions, climate, milling technique, fermentation time, and baking method all influence how bread tastes and how long it lasts.

The English muffins in my cabinet are not just alarming. They are instructive. They show how thoroughly the modern food system has optimized for consistency, stability, and scale. Bread that can sit unchanged for months reflects decisions made across plant breeding, milling technology, ingredient formulation, packaging design, and distribution logistics.

Bread used to move quickly from oven to table because it had to. Now it moves through a system designed to extend its useful life as long as possible.

When something as familiar as bread behaves in a way that makes you notice something is off, it is worth asking why. I think it’s good that we notice and hold as “not normal” the fact that English muffins stay fresh too long. Keep noticing. And keep asking why.

This is the idea behind Bite Sized. Start with something ordinary and follow it far enough to understand what shaped it. Sometimes we end up with more questions than answers. And that’s ok.

Because food looks simple, but it isn’t.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

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It came up when I asked him whether New York Times Cooking, a recipe site reaching millions of people, was telling its readers to find their farmer, source better, choose well. His answer was practical. You cannot scale a recipe site by demanding that every chicken in every chicken recipe was raised by someone the home cook knows by name. What you can do, he said, is point people toward the best available ingredient. Whatever that is. Wherever they are.

That phrase has been rattling around in my head ever since, because I think it captures something most of us are not saying out loud about how American food culture is actually changing. Slowly. Unevenly. Often invisibly. And almost always one ingredient at a time.

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The progress that nobody is celebrating

Sam has been writing about food for twenty five years, give or take. He helped build the food culture at The New York Times. He is now writing The Morning newsletter to sixteen million subscribers, five days a week. So when he says something has changed, it is worth pausing on.

Here is what he sees. When he started, real food was hard to come by. You could not get lemongrass anywhere. Forget about an organic chicken thigh, much less one from a farmer you knew. Supermarkets were, in his words, anodyne and commercial. Eastern Long Island, where he spends his free time, used to ship its vegetables to the city. The local IGA was grim.

Now, in the same supermarket, there is locally grown produce in the produce section. Greenport stocks food that came from down the road. Farmers, who used to feel exotic, are central to a lot of people’s lives.

This used to be so much worse.

I needed to hear that. I think a lot of us need to hear it. We spend so much time staring at what is broken that we forget to mark what has shifted. Two decades ago a farmers market was a novelty. Today, in many parts of the country, it is the place people plan their week around. That is not nothing. That is a generation of slow, patient, ingredient by ingredient pressure paying off.

Progress in food does not announce itself. It shows up as a tomato that tastes like a tomato. It shows up as a kid who knows the name of the person who raised her chicken. It shows up as a recipe site with millions of users casually nudging readers toward better.

Cooking breeds confidence. Confidence breeds change.

I asked Sam about his cookbook, No Recipe Recipes, which I love because it gives people permission to cook the way most home cooks actually cook, with what they have in front of them. His framing was musical. A regular recipe is sheet music, every note written out. A no recipe recipe is a chord chart. It assumes you can already play.

You only get there by cooking. A lot. You make the same dish three times and it becomes yours. You start riffing. The riff works, so you riff again. That confidence does not arrive all at once. It builds the way any practice builds, through repetition.

Then he said something that I think is the quiet engine of every shift we are trying to make in this country.

Once you have tasted a truly delicious sweet potato, you are not going back to a commodity sweet potato. You are going to want to go back to the thing that you got.

That is not a marketing line. That is a recalibration of baseline. Once your body has the reference point, the cheap version stops working. It does not taste right. It does not feel right. It does not satisfy. The pull back toward the better version is not discipline. It is preference. And preference, unlike information, does not need to be repeated to stick. It moves through memory, through the body, through repetition until what once felt like an upgrade simply becomes the new normal.

That is how behavior actually changes. Not through guilt. Not through a graphic. Through one really good sweet potato.

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The Sysco truck and the cost of sameness

Sam and I spent a stretch of the conversation on the part of the system that does not get better. Sysco. US Foods. Baldor. The big distribution machines that move food into restaurants across the country.

His description of the problem was sharp. The food on the Sysco truck is not going to decrease in quality. It is also not going to increase. It is going to be the same. And that sameness, he said, is mediocre at best.

We talked about Maine, where he has family. Maine has some of the most extraordinary produce, seafood, and meat in the country. And yet if you walk into a diner in rural Maine, almost all of it came off a Sysco truck. The lobster shacks are even more absurd. The lobster might have been pulled out of the water a hundred yards from where you are sitting, but it goes two hundred miles to Portland to be processed and two hundred miles back. By the time it reaches your plate, you are eating a four hundred mile lobster on a commercial bun with bad butter and lettuce that was trucked in from California.

That is the system, in miniature.

It is not that better food does not exist nearby. It is that the system is built in a way that makes deviating from sameness feel risky, inefficient, or unnecessary. Sysco and the rest are not bad actors. They are responding to exactly what their customers ask for. Easy. Predictable. Same every time. The cost is that easy, predictable, and same every time is also flat. It is also forgettable. It is also, slowly, training a generation of diners not to expect anything more.

What restaurants could be

We spend close to sixty percent of our food dollars in restaurants. That is a stunning amount of food not coming out of a home kitchen. And it gives restaurants enormous leverage in this story, leverage that mostly goes unused.

Sam talked about restaurants as cultural experience, not just feeding experience. The best ones are telling a story. The story of a place. The story of a cuisine. The story of an ingredient. He described the moment a restaurant introduces a diner to a particular farmer’s sweet potato, or a winter green grown in a hoop house, or a butter that genuinely tastes different. Not in a performative way, not in the credit-every-farmer-on-the-menu way that became its own kind of theater for a while. Just honestly. Look at this thing this person grew. Taste it.

That is the kind of restaurant experience that earns the dollars. That is the kind that builds the bridge between the farmer and the eater that almost nothing else in our culture builds.

And it is the kind that is hard to do, because the system underneath it is fighting you.

The friction is the relationship

I told Sam about a farmer I know in Wisconsin who works with a fast casual restaurant. They wanted to swap something into their bowl program in August. She told them no. If they wanted that ingredient next year, they had to tell her in November. They have what we politely call tension. They argue about romaine. She tries to convince them that something different would be more flavorful, more nutritious, easier to grow in her climate. Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they don’t.

That tension is not a bug. That tension is the relationship.

Sam told me about a celery soup he had in Maine that stopped him in his tracks. He asked the chef what the secret was. She said, the celery. The chef gave him a stalk. He bit into it. It tasted like the soup. He was thrilled. The chef was thrilled. The farmer, presumably, was thrilled, until the farmer did the math on water and price and figured out that the magic celery was not going to scale, because at twenty dollars a stalk you have a problem. So he grew carrots instead. Which were also amazing.

That is what a real chef-farmer relationship looks like. It is not a logo on a menu. It is a running negotiation. Seasonality. Yield. Price. Water. Lead time. The variability is not the obstacle to creativity, it is the source of it. The farmer is a co-creator. The chef is a translator. The diner, whether they realize it or not, is participating in a system that is alive in a way the Sysco truck cannot be.

You cannot get to that with a vegetable broker. You cannot get to that without picking up the phone, walking the field, and being willing to have an actual fight about romaine.

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Less, but better

Sam was visiting his brother in Maine. They went to the farmers market. Got a dozen eggs. Some venison breakfast sausage his brother had made. A loaf of sourdough. He fried one egg. Cooked one patty. Toasted one slice of bread with butter.

He said it was the best breakfast he had eaten in years. It filled him up. It carried him through the morning. He wanted to repeat it every day he was there.

Then he compared that to what you get at a diner. Three over easy. Three sausage links. Two slices of mediocre toast. A pile of hash browns.

His point, and I think it is the most important point of the whole conversation, is that real food does not need volume to satisfy. When the ingredients are good, you do not need as many of them. You do not need the gigantic ribeye if a smaller one from a better farm has the marbling and the flavor. You do not need to portion up like, in his words, a Sysco eater.

Which means the math people use to argue against better food, that it is too expensive, falls apart on the plate. You are not eating the same quantity of two different products. You are eating less of one because it actually feeds you. The cost per meal is not what the cost per pound suggests. The cost per experience is the number that matters, and the better food wins more often than people assume.

The part that is not getting better

Sam and I are both, in his phrase, congenitally optimistic. We agreed that things have improved. We agreed that the trajectory is real. And then we both had to be honest about the part that is not improving.

The divide is widening. The pandemic did move some people to rural areas where they discovered they could work remotely and eat closer to the source. But the bigger flow is in the other direction. People are leaving rural America for cities. Small towns are emptying. The relationships between consumers and farms are getting harder, not easier, to sustain across that distance.

And the inequality of who eats well is starker every year. For people with regular paychecks and the time to choose, food keeps getting better. For people on the lower end, it keeps getting worse. The Family Dollar is not stocking what the farmers market is stocking. The choices in too much of America are still the canned and the engineered, and the people making those choices are not making them out of preference. They are making them because that is what is available.

Sam said it as plainly as anyone has said it to me. The deliciousness, the connection, the closeness to the source, cannot only be a privilege of the well to do. If real food is just the upgrade tier, we have not actually changed the system. We have just sorted ourselves into who gets to eat from it.

What I am taking away

I do not think Sam was offering a policy prescription. He was describing what he sees from inside one of the most influential food platforms in the country, and what he sees is real, and complicated, and slow.

What I am taking away is this. The change is happening. It is happening at the speed of one good ingredient at a time. It is happening in the home cook who roasted a sweet potato that ruined her for grocery store sweet potatoes. It is happening at the IGA that started carrying local greens. It is happening in the restaurant that stopped pretending the Sysco truck was good enough. It is happening in the chef and the farmer who are still arguing about romaine.

Best available is not a low bar. It is the only bar that works at scale. The job is to keep raising what counts as available, until the better version is no longer the upgrade. It is just the food.

And the people who make that happen, the small and mid-sized farmers Sam kept coming back to, are the ones doing the slow, expensive, unglamorous work of changing what is available in the first place. They cannot do it alone. Sysco is not going to do it for them. Walmart and Costco will do bits of it because it serves their bottom line, and that is fine, even good. But the slow recalibration of American taste is being done in fields most of us will never visit, by people most of us will never meet.

The least we can do is know who they are.

If you want to take a step toward that, start by finding a farmer near you. Even just knowing one of them changes how you see what ends up on your plate. A simple way to do that is here.

And if you already have someone in mind, nominate them through the For Farmers Movement. It is one of the most direct ways to support the people doing this work: Nominate here.

If you enjoyed this conversation with Sam, take a moment to rate and review One Bite is Everything wherever you listen. It helps more people find these conversations and become part of the shift.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.

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It was not Old MacDonald’s farm, but it did begin to resemble the version many of us grew up picturing. Different animals with different roles, a small ecosystem forming almost by instinct. Each addition changed the rhythm of the place. Each animal brought a different kind of attention with it.

Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.

And on that farm he had a cow. And a pig. And chickens. The song describes a farm that feels immediately recognizable even to people who have never set foot on one. A mixture of animals, some noise, a barn somewhere in the background.

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In 2019, I interviewed an agricultural economist from the University of Wisconsin who specializes in dairy markets. He described a study examining how Americans perceive the rural landscape. The image most people carry is remarkably consistent: a red barn, a silo, a few cows, maybe sheep in the distance. It is not necessarily a farm most people have experienced firsthand, but it is one most people feel they know. And one they cherish and want to continue seeing.

It is part of our cultural vocabulary.

That image still exists in many places, especially on smaller farms, but it represents a shrinking share of American agricultural land.

Drive through large parts of the Midwest today and the landscape often looks very different. Long stretches of a single crop extend to the horizon. Corn. Soybeans. Wheat. One field planted entirely in one crop, repeated for miles.

Corn alone is planted on roughly 90 million acres in the United States each year, producing about 15 billion bushels annually. Measured by weight, that is more than 380 million metric tons of corn moving through the system each year. Only a relatively small portion becomes sweet corn or corn on the cob. Roughly 40 percent is used for ethanol production, about 35 to 40 percent becomes feed for livestock, and much of the remaining volume is processed into ingredients such as corn syrup, corn starch, corn oil, and other derivatives that appear in thousands of packaged foods.

Soybeans occupy a similarly large footprint, typically planted on 85 to 90 million acres each year and producing more than 4 billion bushels annually. Most soybeans are processed into soybean oil and soybean meal. The oil is widely used in packaged foods, salad dressings, and restaurant fryers, while the protein-rich meal becomes a primary feed ingredient for poultry, pigs, dairy cows, and farmed fish.

Together, corn and soybeans account for well over 170 million acres of American farmland and represent an enormous share of total crop production by volume.

These crops are not dominant by accident.

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Federal farm policy has supported commodity crop production for decades through crop insurance programs, research funding, infrastructure investment, and market development. Corn and soybeans store well, ship efficiently, and move easily through established global trade channels. Specialized planting and harvesting equipment allows farmers to manage large acreage with relatively limited labor. Grain elevators, rail systems, export terminals, and processing plants are designed around these crops, reinforcing their economic advantage.

When markets, equipment, insurance structures, and infrastructure all align around a handful of crops, it becomes financially rational for farmers to participate in that system.

Planting thousands of acres of one crop can reduce labor costs, simplify management decisions, and create predictable revenue streams tied to global commodity markets. Diversified farms, while often more resilient ecologically, can require more labor, more marketing effort, and more complex distribution relationships.

Economic incentives shape the landscape as much as soil and weather do. The result is not just a countryside that looks different. It behaves differently too.

When one large farm replaces many smaller farms, the change is not only visual. It changes who lives on the land, who earns from it, who supplies it, and who depends on it. Twenty farms mean more families, more payrolls, more purchases at local businesses, more repairs, more feed orders, more vet calls, more school enrollment, more people with a stake in whether a town survives. One very large farm may produce the same amount of milk or grain, but it does not spread economic life through a region in the same way.

Sarah Lloyd, a Wisconsin dairy farmer with a PhD in rural sociology and deep experience in agricultural supply chains, framed the question this way: “What would you rather have — 2,000 cows on one farm, or the same 2,000 cows spread across 20 farms, each operating as its own economic engine?”

Regional farm economies create redundancy. They create relationships. They create another layer of security when larger supply chains break down, as we have seen repeatedly over the past couple of decades. When production is spread across more farms, more people, and more places, risk is spread too. When it is concentrated, efficiency may rise, but vulnerability can rise with it.

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Old MacDonald’s farm may be part fantasy now, or at least an increasingly outdated picture of American agriculture, but it still points to something real and important. Diversity on farms supports diversity in local economies. It creates more flavor, more resilience, more care for the land, and more points of connection between people and the places that feed them. It is also hard work. The kind of hard work we still need done, whether or not most of us ever set foot on a farm.

That is part of what makes the song linger. It carries an older picture of rural life that many of us still respond to instinctively. We drive past a beautiful cornfield and a red barn and feel some version of comfort, as if we are seeing proof that this country still knows how to feed itself. But often that landscape is signaling something else entirely: concentration, specialization, dependence on a narrow set of crops, and a system that looks pastoral from the road while behaving very differently underneath.

You do not need to study agricultural policy to notice that the picture in the song does not fully match the picture outside the window.

This is the idea behind Bite Sized. Start with something ordinary. Follow the thread far enough to see what it really includes. What do we know? What are we missing? One bite at a time.

Because food looks simple, but it isn’t.

Dana DiPrima writes Bite Sized and hosts One Bite is Everything, a podcast exploring how food connects to larger forces shaping health, the environment, the economy, and everyday life. She is the founder of the For Farmers Movement, a national initiative that directs funding to small and mid-sized farms while helping more people understand the realities farmers face.

Her work focuses on closing the gap between the people who grow food and the people who rely on it, helping the 98% of us outside agriculture better understand how food actually works.