America is losing 63 family farms every single day.
Bayer and Corteva are getting rich off every one of them.
And RFK Jr. just found the farm that proves neither company is as untouchable as they want you to believe.
How Big Ag Turned Family Farms Into Chemical Dependencies
America is hemorrhaging farms.
More than 23,000 every year since 2017 – most of them small family operations, the kind that built rural America.
Just two companies — Bayer and Corteva — now control nearly three-quarters of all corn acres planted in America.
They don't just sell the seeds.
They bundle the seeds with their own proprietary pesticides and herbicides, locking farmers into a purchasing cycle they cannot escape without losing access to the genetics they need to compete.
Since 2016, pesticide costs for American farmers jumped 42 percent, fertilizer 44 percent, and seed 26 percent.
At the same time, corn, soybeans, and wheat prices crashed more than 50 percent per bushel from their 2022 peaks.
The farmer buys chemicals at record prices and sells the crop at rock-bottom prices while Bayer and Corteva pocket the difference.
Farm bankruptcies hit 315 in 2025 – a 46 percent jump from the year before.
A farmer told a reporter he lost $1 million in 2024 growing the best crop of his career.
When two corporations control your inputs, your seeds, and your margins, the best harvest of your life still doesn't generate a positive cash flow.
The Family Farm That Proved Regenerative Agriculture Works
Bob Jones Sr. started farming in northern Ohio in 1958.
By the early 1980s he had built a 1,200-acre operation.
Then a hailstorm, soaring interest rates, and the early wave of corporate consolidation hit at once, and the whole thing went to auction in a single day.
His son Lee stood there and watched 20 years of his parents' work go to strangers – the farm, the family home, everything they had built.
They rented six acres and started over.
No chemicals, because they couldn't afford them.
No synthetic inputs, because there was no budget for them.
They grew for flavor and sold directly to chefs, because commodity prices couldn't sustain them.
What they found by necessity was the answer Bayer and Corteva have spent billions suppressing.
You don't need them.
Today The Chef's Garden is a thriving 400-acre operation – 600 varieties of produce, a research lab, direct relationships with world-class chefs, and an 80 percent cut in pesticide use compared to conventional farming.
Researchers studying regenerative and conventional corn farms across the Northern Plains found something that belongs on the front page of every farm newspaper in America.
Regenerative farms produced 29 percent less grain than conventional farms.
They generated 78 percent higher profits.
Less grain, 78 percent more money – because the farmer wasn't writing a check to Bayer every spring.
Bob Jones laid it out for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the tour.
"We spend the cheapest amount per capita on food of any industrialization in the world," Jones said. "Conversely, we spend more per capita than any industrialization in the world on health care."
The family buying the cheapest food is also paying the most to treat what that food did to them.
Bayer and Corteva are on both ends of that transaction.
RFK Jr and the MAHA Commission Are Making This a Federal Fight
RFK Jr. visited The Chef's Garden last week as part of his "Take Back Your Health" tour through Ohio.
He stood in a field of microgreens and said what the agriculture lobby has been dreading.
"We spoke to over 100 farmers and farm organizations when we were developing the MAHA Report," Kennedy said. "What we have frequently heard is that they want to get away from pesticides because they know those chemicals are destroying their soil. They know it's making them sick."
Then he said the line that should end every argument about whether the current system is working.
"Many of their products cannot be sold in other countries because they use the pesticides or herbicides."
Food you are feeding your children tonight cannot be exported to Europe because of the chemical levels.
Bayer and Corteva lobbied to keep those chemicals on the market.
They lobbied hard enough last fall to gut the pesticide restrictions in Kennedy's own MAHA Commission report.
President Trump established the MAHA Commission to break this kind of corporate stranglehold on American health.
Kennedy's farm tour is the answer to the lobby that tried to stop him – not another report, not another press conference, but a 400-acre Ohio operation that has been proving the corporations wrong since 1984.
Sixty-three families lose their farm today while Bayer and Corteva rake in money.
Kennedy just showed the ones still standing exactly how to fight back.
Sources:
- Jeff Louderback, "RFK Jr. Visits Ohio Farm That Shows Regenerative Methods Grow Healthy Food," The Epoch Times, May 16, 2026.
- American Farm Bureau Federation, "Farm Bankruptcies Continued to Climb in 2025," AFBF Market Intel, 2026.
- Cowboy State Daily, "USDA Reports 15,000 Small Farms Closed or Consolidated Last Year in the U.S.," February 25, 2026.
- Jonathan Lundgren and Gabe Brown, "Regenerative Agriculture: Merging Farming and Natural Resource Conservation Profitably," PeerJ, 2018.