Small farmers are caught in a squeeze play. With such reduced price competition farmers must pay what these corporate giants demand. Farmers who are convinced to use them must sign contracts, giving up their traditional, efficient practice of saving seeds to replant. Meanwhile, at the selling end of the cycle, farmers face even greater consolidation from food processing and manufacturing companies. Similar numbers apply in poultry, hogs, soya et al.
Real competition is gone.
It's just small family farmers up against global oligopolies. In other words, the situation got steadily worse. So they lost 73 on every bushel of corn they sold. Returning to hogs, by the last quarter of 1998, hog farmers could only sell hogs to processors at 15 per pound. But the cost of production was 55-60 per pound, thus increasing small farmer foreclosures and bankruptcies.