The antitrust critique of industrial agriculture dominates discussions of the farm economy in progressive media and policy circles.

In a fiery attack on Joe Biden’s agricultural team during the 2020 campaign, David Dayen argued that cattle ranchers, hog farmers, and crop producers are all at the mercy of corporate middlemen like Cargill and Bayer, who exert excessive control over the industry and bend farmers to their will. In her 2020 book Break ’Em Up, Zephyr Teachout uses the metaphor of “chickenization” to compare the plight of chicken farmers forced to use the feed supplied by Tyson to rideshare drivers who must accept Uber’s rate cuts. “Some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies may be in agriculture and are making huge profits,” Teachout writes, “but farmers are poor and insecure.”

The antitrust movement is not wrong to focus on the power of corporations: agribusiness has helped transform huge swathes of the globe into biological wastelands, depopulated the countryside, and created a class of hyper-exploited workers. But the standard antitrust analysis overlooks how much US farmers benefit from, and are invested in, the current system.