For most Americans, Thanksgiving Day means family and friends gathering to share healthy, home-cooked foods, usually featuring a large turkey or ham as the centerpiece. As the holiday’s name implies, it is a day of gratitude for the many blessings Americans enjoy, especially food and family. America’s farmers make this possible.
Setting the Thanksgiving Table
About 46 million turkeys are consumed in America each year for Thanksgiving. Minnesota is by far the largest turkey-producing state – thanks to its farmers. They produce an amazing diversity of foods for our tables, not just for turkey day but every day.
The nation’s farmers raise approximately 75 million pigs annually (ham is the second most popular meat for Thanksgiving dinner). The current beef herd numbers 28.7 million animals, and an estimated 9.3 million cows are milked each day to supply milk and cheese for American larders. Those Thanksgiving Day mashed and scalloped potatoes are taken from the 420 million hundredweight of spuds grown in US soil annually, and that after-dinner apple pie requires some of the 278.5 million bushels (11.7 billion pounds) of apples harvested in the country each year. Farmers raised 9.33 billion broiler chickens in 2024, and 109 billion eggs.
Yet farmers are struggling to make a decent living. Decades of industry consolidation have reduced US farm acreage and led to the closure of small family farms. America remains the world’s largest exporter of agricultural goods but now imports more food than it exports – and much of that is processed.
Farmers Take a Bashing
Large farms benefit from complex regulations that overburden small operators and receive the lion’s share of federal and state subsidies. Input costs for fertilizers, equipment, pesticides, and seed have all increased faster than the prices most farmers receive for their commodities. Land prices have skyrocketed, as have interest rates. The average US farmer is now about 60, and young people understandably don’t want to work without vacations for minimal pay.
The social justice movement and socialist ideology have focused attention on migrant farm workers and race, but plants and livestock are colorblind, as are the markets that pay for goods. Milk is white, like most of the farmers who run US dairies, but little is heard when the price of milk plunges below the cost of production. While woke corporations like Ben & Jerry’s howl about “migrant justice” for immigrant farm workers being paid $17 an hour, the white farmers they work for are often earning a negative daily wage – no unions, no minimum wage, no paid paternity leave. Cows must be milked or fed 365 days a year: Farmers going on strike would kill them.
Industrial agriculture drives down prices for farmers while increasing costs for debt, chemical inputs, and shipping distances. The result is environmental pollution, struggling rural economies, rising farmer suicide rates, and a loss of farmland to hedge funds and opportunists such as Bill Gates. There is a lot of money to be made in food, but less and less of it trickles down to farm families every year as monopolies grow and farmland shrinks.
Taking Food Security for Granted?
Eroding soils and depleted aquifers pose long-term threats to US food security. As social justice warriors denigrate farmers as oppressive landowners and claim migrants do all the work because Americans are lazy, citizen farmers grow increasingly discouraged. Cheap foreign labor and lax regulations abroad encourage anti-competitive imports that nudge more US farmers to throw in the towel every day. America is losing both its farmers and its farmland.
The closer food is to its origin when consumed, the fresher it is. The fewer pesticide residues, antibiotics, or growth hormones ingested at Thanksgiving, the better the odds that the family will gather healthily for many more. Local small farms meet this demand.
For Thanksgiving Day 2025, Americans should raise a glass (or turkey leg) to salute domestic farmers who make the abundance of healthy food on the table possible. Decades of affordable food have led many Americans to take their food and farmers for granted. Thanksgiving is the time to express an attitude of gratitude, especially to the nation’s farmers.
Happy Thanksgiving to America’s farmers!
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