What happens when you gaslight farmers

Welcome to Commodity Bread — a newsletter about the food system, the economics behind it, and what it quietly tells us about so much else.

So let’s get into it. This time, we’re double clicking on a weird item out of the White House.

Let's set the scene. American farmers are currently getting squeezed from both ends: fuel and fertilizer costs are spiking because the US decided to rattle energy markets with a war in Iran, while Trump's tariffs have simultaneously torched the export markets that American agriculture spent decades cultivating. The White House's response to this entirely self-inflicted wound? A $40 billion bailout and a website called OnlyFarms.gov.

Yes. A government agriculture portal named after one of the internet's premiere subscription platforms for porn. The White House apparently looked at the political situation and thought: what this needs is more brand synergy with amateur adult entertainment.

The site itself is terribly, tragically boring. It’s a state-by-state savings map, some bullet points about the One Big Beautiful Bill, and an SBA loan program. It went viral anyway — because of course!

But here’s the thing. Even if it’s an extreme reach, this whole mess got me thinking about other times in history when famous leaders outright ignored the pains of people who are actually out there producing out agricultural goods.

Truth be told, it is, in fact, one of history’s most reliably fatal mistakes.

Here’s a very brief and extremely abbreviated syllabus of what happens when you gaslight farmers:

Exhibit A: Mao Zedong, Great Leap Forward (1958–1962)

Mao decided that agricultural reality was bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, so he replaced it with ideology. Collective farms were forced into existence, production quotas were set at levels achievable only in a fever dream, and local officials simply fabricated the numbers. The grain was collected. The farmers starved. Somewhere between 15 and 55 million people (obviously a highly-debatable figure) died in what remains one of history's worst self-inflicted famines. The lesson: a regime that mistakes data performance for actual output will eventually run out of output.

Exhibit B: Louis XVI (France, pre-1789)

France had bread problems. Specifically: there wasn't enough of it, and what existed was expensive. The monarchy's response? It oscillated between incompetence and indifference. The aristocracy ate well, the peasants did not. The fact that Louis XVI was catastrophically disconnected from the material reality of the people whose labor made his world possible didn’t help, either. The result was a revolution, a republic, and a guillotine, in roughly that order. The lesson: food problems are not communications problems. You cannot meme your way out of them.

Exhibit C: The Late Roman Republic (A lot of people, 2nd–1st Century BCE)

As Rome's conquest machine cranked along, large estates (latifundia) swallowed up the small farms of the citizen-soldiers who had built the republic. Displaced farmers flooded into Rome, absolutely pissed. Two Roman tribunes, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tried to redistribute land back to them and were murdered for it by the Senate. The result was a century of civil wars, the collapse of republican norms, and eventually Julius Caesar — which is to say, a strongman promising to fix everything the elites had broken. The lesson: when you systematically dispossess your agricultural base and then kill the reformers trying to address it, you don't get stability. You get Caesar.

The farmers on the South Lawn of the White House were there because they represent constituencies whose livelihoods have genuinely been disrupted — by tariffs the administration imposed, by trade wars it chose, by energy market chaos it helped create. The $40 billion in relief payments are not, as the website cheerfully implies, savings. They are compensation. They are the administration paying farmers for damage the administration caused, and then building a website to take credit for the check.

Also on the site this week:

🍫 One market, many prices — Mondelēz got fined €337 million for charging different prices for the same chocolate bar in different EU countries. A useful window into how food markets actually work.

⚖️ The laws that were supposed to protect farmers are protecting something else — Right-to-farm laws were designed to keep suburban sprawl from suing farmers out of existence. They've been quietly repurposed.

🌳 The forests nobody is watching — Beef and soy get the headlines. Maize, rice, and cassava are clearing forests that no regulation is designed to see.

🥦 The organic question, 20 years later — Two new papers, twenty years of data, and an argument that still hasn't fully resolved itself.