Farm Action Agriculture Consolidation Data Hub
Guest post featuring Angela Huffman of Farm Action. Originally published in the Winter 2025 OEFFA Newsletter.
A key priority for the OEFFA Policy team is addressing consolidation in food systems and advocating for policies that support small and mid-sized farming operations. We are digging into a new report and data hub published by the advocacy group Farm Action, which reveals that just three dozen corporations now control almost every industry involved in growing, processing, and distributing food in America.
We discussed the findings with Farm Action president Angela Huffman, who is a long-time OEFFA member and a graduate of OSU’s College of Public Affairs. Huffman also raises registered Katahdin sheep on her family’s 200-year-old farm in northwest Ohio.
What is the Agriculture Consolidation Data Hub and why did you create it?
We saw a need for a go-to source for information on agriculture industry consolidation. Whenever we were working to pull together data for policymakers, the press, or for our own reporting, we found that information to be scattered across many different sources and often out of date. We knew others must be having the same experience. We created the Agriculture Consolidation Data Hub to be a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in the topic, whether you’re looking for a quick statistic or wanting to take a deep dive into a specific sector.
How do you measure market concentration and which are the most concentrated agriculture markets?
A simple measure of market concentration is a ratio, typically the combined share of the top four firms, or concentration ratio four (CR4). For example, the top four firms in the U.S. beef processing sector are Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Cargill, and National Beef. They process 25 percent, 25 percent, 20 percent, and 15 percent of beef, respectively. Adding up their market share results in a CR4 of 85 percent.
Economists find that market abuses like price fixing are more likely to occur when a sector’s CR4 exceeds 40 percent. Today, CR4s far surpass 40 percent in almost every food and agriculture sector, including seeds, chemicals, equipment, meat processing, and grocery retail. We compiled concentration ratios and the top firms for every sector on our Data Hub.
Tell us about your research report at the center of the Data Hub.
This 200-page report is a deep dive into the state of the food system, providing definitive evidence of corporate control over who gets to farm, how they farm, what food gets produced and sold in this country, and how much consumers must pay for it.
It is broken down into two sections: the first dives into the history of antimonopoly policy in American agriculture, detailing the policy choices and corporate actions that got us here; the second part provides in-depth investigations into each major sector of today’s agricultural economy.
The history is very important to us because it provides lessons we can draw from as we search for solutions today. The U.S. has been here before: In the early 1900s, American agriculture markets were nearly as consolidated as they are today. What we learn from history is that it takes government action to dismantle concentration in the food system.
What are some key takeaways in the report that small and mid-scale farmers should pay attention to?
First, if you’re a farmer, know that you are not alone in the challenges you face in growing and marketing your products. These barriers are attributable to larger market trends that exist due to consolidation in the industry.
Here are a few examples that we dive into in the report:
- Crop insurance and farm credit: Today, these financial resources are heavily skewed to benefit farms growing large acreages of commodity crops like corn and soybeans. In contrast, smaller scale, more diverse, regenerative/organic, and fruit and vegetable growers have more barriers, fewer options, and overall much more diminished access to vital credit and risk management tools.
- Seeds: Historically, farmers, researchers, and commercial enterprises developed new seed varieties through cross-fertilization. But following the 1980 Supreme Court decision that genetically modified seeds could receive patent protection, major biotech companies took over the sector, using intellectual property rights to restrict others’ access to the technologies and cultivars needed to cultivate new products. As a result, independent breeders increasingly have restricted access to plant genetics — reducing the diversity of seed, driving up prices, and weakening our food security.
- Produce distribution: Food hubs, or aggregators that can buy, combine, and market produce from small growers on a regional scale, are a cooperative-style answer to the volume demands of large produce buyers. Although many food hubs have become successful in connecting independent producers to local and regional processors, distributors, and retailers, practically none have succeeded in marketing produce to national grocery chains. This can be attributed to the consolidation of middlemen known as “Grower-Shipper-Packers,” or GSPs, and their collusive relationships with an even more consolidated grocery sector. Together, GSPs and dominant grocery chains have effectively locked out independent produce distributors, limiting the markets for growers.
What’s next for the Data Hub and how can we get involved?
We will be listening to those in the movement to help guide us for future updates, as we want to ensure the data hub is the trusted go-to source on market concentration. We urge readers to visit the hub to check out the information, be informed, and use it as a resource to make your voice heard. You can also sign up for our twice-monthly newsletter here.