Building the Missing Market: A National Strategy for American Agriculture

Farmers today are producing more with less, yet the economics underneath that progress have become increasingly strained. Net farm income has grown more dependent on large, irregular government payments and volatile livestock cycles. The agricultural trade surplus that defined U.S. leadership for decades has disappeared. The country has lost nearly 150,000 farms in five years, while a major generational transfer of farmland is already underway.

S2G’s new report explores the structural forces behind that contradiction and proposes a different way to measure progress. Instead of optimizing primarily for yield per acre, the report argues that the next era of American agriculture should focus on risk-adjusted profit per acre, or how much a farmer keeps from each acre and how reliably they keep it after accounting for costs and risk.

The report examines:

• Where the market is missing, including gaps in committed buyers, price signals, transition financing, market infrastructure, and access to innovation.
   
• Why those gaps persist, including concentrated input and processing markets, fragile supply chains, generational land transfer, and growing global competition.
   
• What it would take to change course, with a 10-year roadmap spanning policy, capital, market development, local infrastructure, and new financial tools designed to improve farmer profitability and resilience.

The goal is a system in which farmers have more viable choices about what to grow, clearer markets for what they produce, financing that reflects how agriculture actually works, and greater ability to capture the value created on their land.

American agriculture has already proven it can produce. The challenge for the next decade is to improve the economics and market structure that determine whether that output translates into durable profitability for farmers.