My understanding is there was a big change in policy during Nixon's administration, when agribusiness lobbyist Earl "Rusty" Butz became USDA secretary.[1] His mottos were "get big or get out" and "plant fence row to fence row."
If you want to fix such problems, fix the incentives that cause them.
Farm subsidies (artificially cheap grains for feeding cattle) and the inheritance tax (children are forced to sell the land after parents die due to tax obligations)
Subsidies are an artifact of scale--optics look bad when a big operation is getting 100K USD when they farm 10k acres
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2017/10/19/irs-an...
That suggests that the number of family farmers caught by the estate tax each year can be counted on your hands. And even then, farmers (unlike everybody else) get 15 years to pay off the estate tax. So, yeah, politicians claiming to hate the estate tax because of its negative impact on small farms are lying their ass off.
Do you have a source for this? If true, wouldn't they just sell a portion of the land to cover the tax, as it only kicks in over $5.5 million?
Just in case, decades ago my dad put the land in a family partnership of which me and my siblings each own 19%. So even if inheritance tax was a thing for family farms, there are ways around it.
We'll have to pay property tax on it, but that's around $3000 per year.
Is it that easy to bypass the estate tax? I'm surprised it collects basically any money at all, if all you have to do is make your children "co-owners" before you die.
Most ranches and farms are set up so that there isn't much value if you don't sell the whole thing.
You need land, the homestead (house, barn, shop, corals...), a water source (ideally multiple), roads in and out, fences carved the right way...
Yes, you could likely sell a portion of the property, but the parts aren't worth the same as the whole. You'd likely eat the cost of adding in new windmills, water storage tanks, and developing the land in order to get it to sell if you were to carve out a part of your existing pastures and put it on the market.
We basically ended up carving off the farm land and selling that, but we had to pay to put a road in... and fences on either side of the road, cattle guards, and it ended up costing $100k in materials and labor (since we had to hire people to do it given nobody lived out there any more)... all just to make $300k.
TL;DR: Ranches are set up to be units, and while you can sell part of the land, it sucks to do so.
It wasn’t only farmers that got clobbered by the inheritance tax. The children of the local shoe store owner were in the same inheritance tax hell.