Op-ed: Agricultural ‘Efficiency’ Is a False Promise
Democracy demands a thriving food system that supports our land, farmers, and communities.
By Tim Gibbons
September 30, 2026
In 2024, more than 348 million acres of farmland were rented out, with 79 percent of those acres owned by non-farming landlords. (Getty Images)
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There is a story we have been told about agriculture for a very long time, and it goes something like this:
Farms get bigger, machines get bigger, companies get bigger. Production gets more concentrated, and every acre produces more food with fewer people.
They call that efficiency.
From there, we make an assumption:
- That small farms are nostalgic.
- That local ownership is inefficient.
- That independent farmers simply cannot compete.
- That consolidation is the natural outcome of technological progress.
I want to challenge these assumptions.
Multinational corporate “efficiency” is not the same thing as resilience, and consolidation is not inevitable. It is the result of policy choices, financial incentives, market structures, and decisions about who gets access to land and capital.
"U.S. agriculture has shifted toward larger operations over the past several decades."
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Here’s the question we should be asking: efficient for whom?
If an agricultural system produces more bushels per worker while making land unaffordable to the next generation of farmers, have we actually created a more efficient food system?
If it lowers the cost of producing a commodity while hollowing out the businesses, processors, equipment dealers, schools, and civic institutions of the communities where that commodity is produced, is that efficiency?
And if the public pays to build and maintain the infrastructure that makes increasingly concentrated agriculture possible, while the economic value increasingly leaves the community, who is actually capturing the benefit?
That’s the problem with the efficiency narrative. It measures what happens inside the farming operation. It often doesn’t measure what happens around the farm. And those consequences are significant.