The agriculture, poultry, meat and seed industry is highly consolidated in United States. Over the last 7 decades since the great depression, agriculture has been shrinking as a percentage of GDP, food prices have been relatively low as a percentage of household expenses compared to other parts of the world, and food availability has been reasonably satisfactory regardless of income levels.
However the danger of consolidated food industry is that there is a much higher likelihood of major food recalls even if a tiny fraction of a certain produce, whether it is tomatoes, oranges, peanut butter, eggs or meat is in question.
The advantage of decentralized food production and distribution is that fresh food is made available locally, supporting local town, rural, or city level economies and there is greater transparency and accountability in use of raw materials. Being decentralized and at a smaller operating scale also allows food safety problems and resultant recalls to be more readily identifiable and local in nature.
Recently, 500 million eggs were recalled, which is a mind numbing scale of poultry recalls. Similar scale has been seen for meat, fruit, vegetables and other food recalls.
It is not clear why there is not much discussion over the size and scope of consolidation in food industry in the US congress or state level governments.
One reason why consolidation of food industry is allowed to happen is that this trend is visible across all industries, whether it is steel, aluminum, ship building, aerospace, car industry or even shaving razor industry.
Another reason is that mechanized farming and the wide acceptance of genetically modified foods make it increasingly difficult for small farmers to compete against sophisticated food growing, harvesting and packaging supply chains of large corporate farming groups.
In addition the food safety laws, inspections, paperwork and regulatory requirements have become so burdensome that small farmers find it difficult to meet these conditions for doing business.
Therefore the momentum is behind agribusiness consolidation.