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Most of what is farmed in Mississippi and the rest of the country isn’t food that goes on Americans’ tables. It is soybeans grown for animal feed, corn grown for ethanol, rice grown to export to Central America and so on. The fruits and vegetables that Mississippians eat are probably grown in California or in other countries.
You would be surprised how much land a single farmer can cultivate with modern equipment nowadays. A quick Google tells me you can expect 7000lbs of rice per acre. So that's only 305 acres of rice. That's not a lot for a modern farm.
Farmers are workers, comrade.
Also, if you're wondering how a worker can afford 1000+ acres of farmland, the answer is massive amounts of debt.
This strikes me as a simplistic interpretation of worker and debt. The farmer who can afford to take on large amounts of debt is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the average worker. The average worker takes on debt for the prerequisites of gainful employment (education, transportation, equipment and uniform), not capital purchase for others to work on. The former gains a wage, the second makes a profit. Yes the latter is built off a proportionally large debt, but it is debt of a different nature.
This person is by definition at least petite bourgeois, same as any small business tyrant with which you may be familiar. And they are publicly squawking about their entitlement to profits as a business owner. They have received over $30k/year in subsidies as a capitalist. This is the typical "farmer" PR game.
Debt doesn't mean they aren't capitalist.
A farmer who is able to own all of that land and that equipment, even with debt, and operates it themselves with or without hired help, is by definition petit bourgeois in terms of their relation to the means of production.
Do you own something that can be taken away from you if you stop paying for it?
Class is your relationship to production, not your balance book.
When the bank owns the land and the equipment, you are not working for yourself. That's the big lie. You are working for the bank.
That's not "the big lie", that's just bigger capitalists extracting from smaller ones. Namely large finance capitalists extracting from smaller bourgeois. It is very transparent, they even write the numbers down on the contracts they sign.
This does not change the fact that class is one's relation to production, not their balance sheet. Nearly every small business tyrant's business is in debt. Yet they have the relation of an owner, not a worker whose labor is exploited.