When the farms die, so do we: A warning from Dr. Meryl Nass
Editor’s note:
The following article is adapted from a presentation by Dr. Meryl Nass, M.D., given on September 27, 2025, for Save Our Food and Farms (SOFAF.org). It has been reformatted for narrative clarity and flow but preserves the data, citations, and urgency of Dr. Nass’s original talk.
A silent crisis is unfolding in America’s fields — one that threatens not just farmers, but everyone who eats. How will we obtain nutritious food when the family farms are gone?
Dr. Meryl Nass, a physician and longtime analyst of health systems and policy, began her presentation with a blunt truth: “Most Americans are eating garbage that slowly poisons them.” What follows isn’t speculation — it’s a cascade of data showing that the U.S. food system has been systematically hollowed out by policy, corporate consolidation, and misplaced priorities. The story of farming in America is no longer a story of feeding people — it’s a story of profit extraction, regulatory capture, and collapse in slow motion.
The poisoned plate
At least half of the foods adults consume — and 60 percent of what teens eat — are “ultra-processed,” according to a 2023 Nature Communications study titled Machine learning prediction of the degree of food processing (Giulia Menichetti et al., April 21, 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10121643/). These are “edible products made from manufactured ingredients that have been extracted, processed, and reassembled to create shelf-stable, tasty, and convenient meals” (NPR, May 25, 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2023/05/25/1178163270/ultra-processed-foods-health-risk-weight-gain).
Corn and soy — the backbone of the American food economy — are processed to death: stripped into starch, sugar, oil, and animal feed. The U.S. produces 8 million tons of high fructose corn syrup every year — about 48 pounds per person. Forty percent of the corn crop goes to ethanol, and much of the rest is chemically extracted using hexane, a toxic solvent also used in gasoline.
Compared to unprocessed foods, ultra-processed foods offer less than 20% of the nutrient density per calorie, twice the calories per ounce, and cost just 38% as much (Frontiers in Nutrition, May 27, 2019, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2019.00070/full). The result: cheap calories, expensive health.
Long-term dietary studies are notoriously hard to conduct, but the evidence is overwhelming — ultra-processed diets correlate with obesity, diabetes, and, increasingly, with mental and inflammatory disorders. Americans are quite literally being starved of nutrients in the midst of abundance.
How the regulators looked away
Dr. Nass points out that Europe and the U.S. diverged decades ago on food safety. European regulators follow the “precautionary principle” — additives must be proven safe before being approved. The U.S., by contrast, operates on a “proof of harm” model, allowing widespread use until damage is undeniable.
The FDA’s “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) loophole, formalized in 1997, allows companies to self-certify additives without FDA review. By 2011, a Pew Charitable Trust study found that at least one-third of the roughly 10,000 chemicals in the food supply had never been formally reviewed by the agency (UC Davis Research, 2023, https://research.ucdavis.edu/ask-the-experts-ultra-processed-foods-and-how-do-they-impact-our-health/).
It’s not just oversight failure — it’s structural abandonment. “The burden of navigating a potentially unsafe food environment falls on consumers,” writes sociologist Norah MacKendrick in Better Safe Than Sorry — and as Nass adds, “that consumer burden now extends to farmers themselves.”
The rigged farm economy
If the food is poisoned, so too are the incentives that produce it.
The USDA recommends that half our plates be filled with fruits and vegetables — but only 4% of federal farm subsidies support that production. Nearly 90% of Americans fall short of the recommended daily allowance for vegetables, and 80% for fruit (Farm Action, Aug. 4, 2022, https://farmaction.us/2022/08/04/putting-our-money-where-our-mouths-should-be-the-great-contradiction-between-u-s-food-subsidies-and-dietary-guidelines/).
Most subsidies go elsewhere: 30% to livestock and feed, 21% to exports, 12% to biofuels, and just 4% to fruits and vegetables. “Growing corn,” says Nass, “is a guaranteed way to fail — unless you’re big enough to lose money and still win.” From 2005 to 2022, U.S. corn farmers lost money in half of all years. In 2023, they barely broke even. Yet subsidies keep the largest operations profitable no matter what happens (USDA ERS, https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note).
The result is perverse: land prices rise with the value of government guarantees, driving out small farmers and concentrating ownership. Crop insurance, originally meant to stabilize farm income, now serves as a wealth transfer to agribusiness. The U.S. pays 62% of the premium on policies most small farmers can’t even access. Private insurers take a guaranteed 14.5% profit, while farmers are required to use chemical herbicides like glyphosate to qualify for coverage (Cato Institute, 2024, https://www.cato.org/policy-investigation/farm-bill-sows-dysfunction-american-agriculture).
The health costs of an artificial diet
Americans now spend more on healthcare — $13,432 per person per year — than any other developed nation, yet live shorter lives (Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, 2023). The childhood obesity rate has more than quintupled since the 1960s, and Type 2 diabetes has doubled in two decades (CDC/NHANES, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED631898.pdf).
“The connection between the destruction of the food system and the decline of public health is not theoretical,” says Nass. “It’s visible in every hospital and every grocery aisle.”
Consolidation: the corporate coup in slow motion
In 1970, ranchers kept 70% of the price you paid for beef. Today, they get barely 30%. The rest flows to the processors and distributors — a cartel of four major companies that control 85% of beef processing, 67% of pork, and 60% of poultry (Farm Action, Sept. 2024). Nearly 2,000 independent slaughterhouses have disappeared since 1990.
“The story of American meatpacking,” said Nass, citing USDA data, “is the story of how consolidation starves producers and consumers alike.” Fewer buyers mean lower prices for farmers, higher prices for shoppers, and no incentive for transparency. The U.S. cattle inventory is now the smallest since 1951, even as beef prices hit record highs (Farm Bureau, May 2025, https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u-s-cattle-inventory-smallest-in-73-years).
The same dynamic extends across agriculture. Four firms control 80% of the corn seed market, 70% of soybean seed, and nearly all chemical inputs (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta — now Bayer, Corteva, and ChemChina). “It’s feudalism with spreadsheets,” Nass remarked.
Even the food policy world itself has been captured. A 2024 network analysis found that multistakeholder food organizations advising the UN and global NGOs are stacked with board members from Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and the World Economic Forum — more than half from just four countries: the U.S., U.K., Netherlands, and Switzerland (Springer, Agriculture and Human Values, 2024, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-024-10593-0).
Global policy and the “food transition”
According to Nass, this consolidation isn’t accidental — it’s part of a coordinated global shift toward centralized control of food production under the banner of “sustainability.” The 2019 UN–World Economic Forum strategic partnership explicitly aims to “accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” focusing on shared networks, outreach, and “innovation” (https://weforum.ent.box.com/s/rdlgipawxkjvi2vdaidw8npbtyach2qb).
The World Economic Forum’s June 2024 white paper, Renovation and Reinvention Are Key to Saving Our Food System, outlines a two-stage “food transition” — first “renovation” (reducing salt, sugar, and fat, adding probiotics, promoting on-pack labeling), then “reinvention” (scaled adoption of plant-based and lab-grown proteins, precision fermentation, and “personalized nutrition”) (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/06/renovation-reinvention-food/).
“The scale of change,” the WEF states, “is akin to the energy transition.” To Nass, this is not reform but replacement — an engineered shift from natural food to synthetic systems justified by climate metrics.
She points to The Lancet’s EAT Commission, which projected “$5–10 trillion in annual benefits” from “transforming the global food system” (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/abstract). The same report described current food systems as “destroying more value than they create.” Yet what kind of “transformation” yields a profit motive that large? In practice, Nass argues, it means more corporate control and less local autonomy — a “food coup” disguised as climate action.
Meanwhile, government and military programs are inching toward normalization of synthetic consumption. DARPA’s 2021 ReSource program announced its aim to turn waste into “on-demand stocks from military waste” — in plain terms, food (https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2021-11-29).
At the same time, Animal Frontiers documented the expansion of edible insect farming across North America (Jennifer Larouche et al., 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10294511/). From beetle meal to cricket flour, the industry is being quietly normalized under the rhetoric of “alternative proteins.”
“What used to be satire,” Nass noted, “is now policy.”
A vanishing way of life
Between 2017 and 2022, the United States lost 142,000 farms — 8% of all operations. Only farms above 5,000 acres grew in number (USDA Census, 2022, https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022). Twenty million acres of cropland disappeared, including three million irrigated acres. Inflation in fertilizer, fuel, and labor costs has made it nearly impossible for small producers to survive.
Median farm income has been negative for five straight years. In 2024, farm households earned –$1,830 from farming, offset only by $86,900 in off-farm income (USDA ERS, 2025 Forecast). “We are watching the slow death of the family farm,” Nass warned. “It’s not just economics. It’s generational collapse.”
Today, 98% of U.S. farms are family-owned, but nearly 40% of farmers are over 65, and half their children will not continue farming. Land is consolidating into the hands of corporations and investment funds. “Young people can’t afford to start, and older farmers can’t afford to quit,” she said. “That’s a civilizational red flag.”
The way back
Dr. Nass closes her argument with solutions — pragmatic, not utopian. To reclaim real food and real farming, she outlines three imperatives:
- Bring the family farm back to life. Provide fair financing. Capitalize credit unions or create federal loan programs tailored to small farms, not agribusiness giants.
- Rein in the monopolies. Enforce existing antitrust laws and block mergers that strangle competition.
- End regulatory capture. Repeal or amend the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967, which forces small farmers to use USDA-inspected plants instead of butchering and selling directly to consumers.
She highlights four bipartisan bills that could help: Senator Mike Rounds’ proposal to recognize state-inspected meat as USDA-equivalent; Representative Thomas Massie’s PRIME Act to permit in-state custom slaughter sales; the Herd Share Act, co-sponsored by Senators Welch and Lee; and legislation enabling on-farm slaughter for retail sale.
Ultimately, Nass says, the future depends not only on farmers — but on eaters. “EATERS must demand, seek out, and buy high-quality food,” she insists. “We can’t wait for the system that created this crisis to fix it.”
Epilogue: The eater’s revolution
At the end of her talk, Dr. Nass didn’t ask for pity for farmers. She asked for courage from consumers. “We have to have a mass movement of eaters,” she said. “Unless we turn this around, the foods we want will become hard to get — and extremely expensive.”
Her message was clear: if Americans want to survive as a healthy, free people, they must rebuild the bridge between soil and table — one farm, one eater, one act of defiance at a time.
