America’s farmers want a future where they can thrive. That means the opportunity to offer consumers healthy, local food and a fair playing field. It means independent food producers having a genuine shot to make a living and pass their farms on to the next generation.
But if you’ve read opinion pages lately (including Agri-Pulse's), you might be forgiven for thinking that a forthcoming Supreme Court ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell will determine the economic future of the American farmer. The case asks whether people who say Roundup made them seriously ill can bring their claims in state court.
When we talk with farmers across the U.S. about their biggest challenges, this isn’t what they raise. What’s at stake before the high court is the legal exposure of a handful of “Big Ag” executives, not the day-to-day realities farmers are facing.
Rather than sticking to the legal dispute at hand, Monsanto and industry-aligned groups argue that, unless Monsanto is granted legal impunity, family farmers across the U.S. will suffer and the global food supply will be at risk.
Last month, an Agri-Pulse opinion piece by Missouri State Senator Kurtis Gregory and Missouri Soybeans CEO Casey Wasser echoed these industry talking points. Gregory and Wasser write that thanks to glyphosate, the chemical at the center of the Roundup cancer cases, family farmers can fulfill their responsibility to be “feeding, fueling and clothing the world.”
It’s easy to be “in the know” about what’s happening in Washington, D.C. Sign up for a FREE month of Agri-Pulse news! Simply click here
This slick PR campaign is designed to help Monsanto hide behind America’s farmers. That’s just one piece of “Big Ag’s” ongoing strategy of avoiding accountability for its many messes, and for claiming more and more of the food system for themselves at the expense of independent farmers.
Here’s what we hear is really holding farmers back right now:
Farmers and ranchers are earning a small fraction of the price consumers pay for food at the grocery store. As food continues to get significantly more expensive, corporate consolidation is squeezing farmers out of anything close to a fair share.
Farmers and ranchers are still waiting for reform to commodity checkoffs. They want those programs to actually start serving them, not secretly funneling farmers’ tax money to the mega-corporations who dominate our current system.
Many farmers are also still reeling from USDA’s reckless termination of millions in grants in 2025. Without these funds, farmers have lost access to markets to sell their goods, educational programs for new farmers have been cancelled, and fields have gone unplanted and unharvested.
FarmSTAND’s amicus brief in Monsanto v. Durnell, joined by 15 farmer and farmworker organizations from around the country, lays out Monsanto’s “long history of enriching itself at farmers’ expense.” As just one example, Monsanto runs its Roundup-Ready seed contract program in a way that “reduces farmers’ economic independence on both the supply side (by requiring farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto every season) and the demand side (by limiting the markets available to farmers),” according to the FarmSTAND brief.
What we need to do to make a future for America’s family farmers is not complicated: we need to break up ag monopolies that drive down what farmers earn. We need to hold industrial ag accountable for its illegal pollution of rural communities. Letting Monsanto off the hook so “Big Ag” can grow even more powerful is the last thing farmers need right now.
Jessica Culpepper is the executive director of FarmSTAND.