By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org.

Question: What does a business do when nobody wants its product or services?

Answer: It asks for the federal government to bail it out and pay for a product nobody wants.

If this sounds silly to you, consider what's going on with America's soybean farmers who lost a quarter of their market when China decided to switch sourcing to Brazil and Argentina in the last couple of months. As a farmer myself, my heart breaks for the plummeting prices and the prospect of losing $200 per acre on the 2025 crop.

But on the other side of my breaking heart is a desire to hear any soybean farmer say, "I'm going to grow something profitable." You'd think in a capitalistic society someone raising soybeans would recognize simple principles in supply and demand. You can't keep supplying when demand wanes and expect a sugar daddy to subsidize your bank account.

What kind of economic gymnastics makes soybean farmers think they deserve taxpayer subsidies for a commodity in oversupply? Where is the courageous soybean farmer who dares to pivot to something else? Or who dares to suggest the farmer can solve this conundrum without government interference?

I'm well aware that the current crisis is China's retaliation for President Donald Trump's tariff campaign. Farmers can rightly say, "We didn't see this coming and planted based on credible market expectations and we were blindsided." But how many times has this cycle, or something like it, repeated itself in the last 50 years? How many of these debacles does it take to convince someone that a fundamental change is necessary?

But it's crickets in the soybean industry. "Build us biodiesel facilities. Find other markets. Give us billions in subsidies." The refrain is loud - and painful to hear. Farmers have historically been some of the most can-do resilient people in society. But right now these soybean farmers sound like a bunch of whining babies.

How did we get here? How did we turn the rugged American farmer into a government dependent? In short, the farm bill and farm programs supposedly instituted to protect farmers from price fluctuations. The result is such that market intervention has led crop farmers growing the six special-interest commodities to stop thinking like businesspeople and instead think like entitled dependents.

The six crops are soybeans, corn, sugar cane, wheat, rice, and cotton. Nothing else gets subsidy anointing from the federal temple like these six commodities. The result is an unholy legacy jerking farmers from one promised salvation to another, none of which actually ends in a better trajectory for primary producers.

When I talk with these farmers about doing something different, such as converting their cropland to perennial prairie polycultures producing grass-finished and fattened beef with management-intensive bio-mimicry, their eyes glaze over as if I've invited them to join me on an exploratory rocket ship to Pluto. For the average person, appreciating the damage from farm programs is difficult.

When decisions run through a matrix of paperwork and farm program payments, it jaundices every option. The idea of getting along on your own without a government paycheck, without a program security blanket, is so foreign that it can't find a home in the farm's business plan. Worse than the financial dependency these programs create is the emotional straitjacket it wraps around farmers.

Right now, the United States has the smallest beef herd since 1950 and prices are unprecedentedly high. Today, cows are like four-legged gold bars. The beef herd reduction began in earnest during the drought in southern tier states during the 2021-2023 seasons. I met Mississippi farmers who went out to check their cows, only to find one or two with broken legs after stepping into wide cracks in the soil. Unbelievable. Tragic.

Farmers liquidated their herds during that time. Unlike soybeans, you can't just plant more cows when the rains return. And return...