MISSION:
Companies in this industry sector grow crops, raise or fatten animals for animal products, and grow and harvest timber.
Major crop production companies include AMAGGI, Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, Sunkist, Cargill, Archer Daniels, and several others.
Major animal production companies include Tyson Food, Agri Beef, Dairy Farmers of America, JBS SA, and WH Group. Major timber operations include PotlatchDeltic, Resolute, Stora Enso, and Weyerhaeuser.
The US, China, India, and Russia are among the top cereal and vegetable crop producers. Top wood product sources include Canada, Russia, Sweden, and the US.
The global agricultural market was about $13 trillion in 2025 and is projected to grow to over 15 trillion dollars by 2030.
The US agriculture and forestry sector includes about 2 million farms and about 3,000 timber companies with combined annual revenue of nearly $500 billion.
HUMAN RSOURCE
The world’s population is rapidly growing and is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. Over 10 percent of total U.S. jobs are related to the agricultural and food sectors.
CORPORATE/NATURAL RESOURCE
The Natural Resource of this industry Land so Land Preservation Concepts are critical. According to FAO that is the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, their global assessment finds soil erosion remains the most severe threat, while sustainable soil management practices are not being adopted fast enough. Soil degradation is continuing to worsen in many parts of the world, while proven practices to protect and restore soils are still not being adopted at the pace and scale required.
1. Proven practices, include:
2. Reduced tillage
3. Integrated nutrient management
4. Crop diversification
5. Cover crops
6. Organic amendments and
7. Agroforestry
All these can mitigate soil threats while sustaining or improving agricultural productivity. The challenge is to scale up their adoption at the required pace. The research of the FAO as well as Government Departments of Agriculture across the world gender toward practices to enhance preservation of soils and quality food production.
Research and Development conducted by corporations in the Agric and food industry often genders mostly towards increasing production while lowering costs. The consequence is a compromise of the nutritional value of food that degrades our health and increases our exposure to diseases.
The industry is headed in the same direction of how surface mining companies raped the lands they mined and destroyed the fortunes of communities… There are some few companies in the industry who are striving to practice land preservation. Notable are:
Global Water Challenge (GWC) and Cargill who are involved in a collaboration known as Cargill Currents. This joint water initiative, with new projects in Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica and Türkiye and expanded projects in Brazil, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and North America.
Since 2021, Cargill Currents has completed 35 projects across five continents, including projects that improved access to safe drinking water and sanitation for nearly 200,000 people in Brazil and West Africa. In North America, completed Cargill Currents projects have supported regenerative agriculture across nearly 42,000 hectares, restored more than 1,700 hectares and planted more than 283,000 trees and shrubs.
Dole Food Company (NYSE: DOLE) has announced seven projects selected for the 2025-26 Harvesting Dreams program, an employee-led initiative that transforms local ideas into practical social, environmental and operational solutions.
Six of the projects are based in Latin America, where teams will address critical community priorities including safe drinking water, watershed protection, healthcare access, housing and sustainable agriculture.
PRODUCTIVITY
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, consumer demand for organically produced goods has shown strong growth since the 1990s, providing market incentives for U.S. farmers across a broad range of products. Declining land tenure practices and increase in organic food production doesn’t tally. The proper trend is that increasing land tenure practices should match the increase of organic food production. This indicates a likely tendency that some of the produce marked as organic may not be true. It’s just a matter of time that evidence of this becomes public.
The Beef Production sector of the industry is facing a huge challenge here in the US. Tyson Foods in a recent Press Release, announced Network Restructuring for their Beef Business. According to the release, Tyson Foods will anchor its beef business around three strategically located beef facilities:
Dakota City, Nebraska;
Holcomb, Kansas and
Amarillo, Texas,
They hope to create a more competitive footprint amidst one of the most historic cattle shortages the country has ever experienced.
Recent USDA cattle inventory data, which included continued evidence of limited heifer retention, indicates these supply constraints are likely to persist, requiring strategic action.
Tyson Foods intends to end operations at its:
Joslin, Illinois, beef facility
Eagle Mountain, Utah, facility.
Pasco, Washington, facility
Capacity from these locations will be moved to more strategically located facilities with ample capacity to grow.
MARKET
With the advent of social media is unlimited access that people have to information. As people become aware of some of the facts surrounding the quality of their food sourced from large companies who are only focused on low quality and profits, people would change their consumption behavior. More people would start investigating the practices of major brands stocked in the shelves of supermarkets and grocery stores. Already there is a growing trend where more people patronize local farms and Farmers Markets to procure directly from trusted farmers…
FINANCE
While each crop or kind of animal and trees have different lifecycles and timelines from seed to harvest, the mandatory quarterly economic cycle reports required of companies listed on the Stock Exchange pressures agriculture and food production companies to make short-term decisions in lieu of medium-term and long-term decisions.
Primitivism is the economic model that fostered the development of this industry from the onset. Farmers produced what food they required and sold the excess to markets. With time, wars displaced some farmers from their farms and so Feudalism, where farmers leased lands from land owners became the economic model. To produce more to meet their rent obligations, farmers sought additional capital for increased productivity and this ushered us into the era of Capitalism. When food costs began to escalate as a result of profiteering, the concept of Socialism where people in communities pooled resources to produce with efficiency became a popular way to mitigate the impact of Capitalism. Communism is the economic model where governments take over the factors of production and engage in the enterprise of agriculture.
The Agric and Food Industry is not a Profiteering-Oriented Industry. It is at best a Family-owned endeavor that upholds core moral values that promote good nutrition and a healthy well-being. Primitivism is the economic model that augurs well for this industry.
With the rising degradation of land for food production and the consequent impact on the wellbeing of people, we predict a trend where many people who are passionate for nutritional wellbeing would move to acquire farmland and endeavor into food production. This would be a reversal of when people migrated from rural areas to cosmopolitan areas.
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