Farmers in the west are reactionaries in my experience and analysis. They’re mostly petit-bourgeois landowners who exploit migrant labor (mostly illegally and paying salaries under the legal minimum) and therefore would be hurt by advances of workers rights or anti-racism.

Looking at the material conditions, at who may benefit and how they may do so, should always be among the first steps in any intellectual investigation.

…but… …sometimes, there isn’t a clear cut material explanation. People are things of matter yet it does not fully define how we behave. Only informs it. Gives it a floor and a ceiling. A context. Our actions can still be compelled by the intangible, by the ideological. Sometimes people act against their own interests without realizing it.

Also, the more small-to-medium regional farms fail, the more land can be snapped up on the cheap by big ag companies

More like Bill Gates and Blackrock or whoever will buy up the farms and plant things they can sell abroad and/or form cartels to conspire to raise consumer prices in the US to further empty the wallets of American workers and to exercise direct control in the climate change world over a vital resource.

America is never going to be dependent on foreign food imports. It’s one of the most amazingly fertile, productive food growing countries on earth. The sheer amount of useful land, good soil, and access to water plus good climate makes her self-sufficient. She could be a fortress and the only impact from losing foreign imports would be no more off-season produce, no more of certain exotic goods, and much higher prices for certain things normally kept low by cheap imports. They’d still have tons of wheat, corn, soy, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. They’d want a bit for many oils but Canada produces a ton of canola, they could increase corn oil production and substitute soy-bean oil.

Even as everyone else gets fucked over by climate change the models I’ve seen show the US will continue to have tons of good growing regions while droughts ravage Europe, Asia, Africa, etc (Russia will also somewhat benefit but I’m not convinced their soil is as good and that the water access won’t be a problem, also melted permafrost regions may just stay hot, too hot for farming a lot of things). Just one more reason why the US is so happy to let climate change rip. It will horribly damage their rivals and leave them in an advantageous position.

they’ll just beg for more subsidies and get them