What have I learned about Washington state and the world in my first year and a half as a farmer?
You pay high prices for beef in stores because Tyson, and other monopoly players, have lobbied for and passed government regulations that make it impossible for a farmer to sell direct to the consumer. I spent a lot of time talking to government employees about how to do this legally and talked to contractors who build the processing facilities to see if I could do it. It costs half a million dollars minimum to build even the smallest scale custom beef processing operation that only allows a farmer to sell beef by the quarter (customers have to buy hundreds of pounds of meat at once) and not by the cut. I butchered a cow for my family’s personal use and it can be done for under a hundred dollars if you don’t have to follow the byzantine government rules. To build a facility that can actually legally sell a steak or ground beef or jerky to you would cost tens of millions of dollars. Tyson lobbied for these laws to be passed for your “protection”…. so you can “safely” buy overpriced processed foods that make you obese.
Chicken is almost as bad. Washington state government regulations require you to spend millions of dollars to build a facility to process a commercially viable amount of chickens. They do offer an exception to produce up to 1,000 meat chickens here https://agr.wa.gov/departments/food-safety/food-safety/special-poultry-permit, but they require all sorts of written plans, 8-10 weeks of wait time after applying, $125, a well water inspection, etc. Keep in mind that you can sell a meat chicken for $10 and the cheapest in store feed sold by Purina costs $7 per chicken for the 8 weeks of growing time, baby chicks cost $3+ apiece, housing them requires electricity at first for heat lamps plus a coop and run… You can see that using this Washington state special poultry permit will lose you money. I just raised and processed chickens for my own consumption and it was very easy and basically free to do. But you are not allowed to buy any from me due to these way over the top laws that only protect the monopoly giants.
As a farmer in Washington state, I have to comply with thousands of pages of regulations on everything from minimum wages ($16.66) to overtime to unemployment to environmental rules about what sprays and fertilizers I can use to the emissions my tractors and trucks put out. All of that would be just fine, but I am expected to compete with the price of food imported from countries that have none of those rules. The ultimate effect of these rules is to simply export worker abuse and environmental abuse to another country while destroying our own food production. The same thing has happened throughout manufacturing in America and now we have almost no manufacturing. If and when the US dollar loses it’s strength, you will not have food to eat.
Farmers receive huge amounts of government welfare in the most ridiculous possible way. If there is a project that is important enough that a farmer would spend his own money on, the government will refuse to help you for that reason. But as long as you aren’t willing to spend your money on it, they will pay for it. So basically most government funded projects are ridiculous and silly. For the couple of little projects I have, I have had a half dozen meetings with a bunch of highly paid government officials and have to wait many months for approvals. Taking government money is the only way to stay in business for a farmer in America due to the crazy government regulations that raise costs very high and make it nearly impossible to compete with foreign businesses that produce cheap food with slave labor and environmental destruction that ends up in our grocery stores branded as “made in America” through more idiotic government rules.
Is all of this wasteful government regulation and overreach just confined to farming? Unfortunately not. State and local governments directly employ 20 million people, the federal government has 3 million employees, and there are tens of millions more on various forms of government contracts. What do you actually get for all of these trillions of dollars being spent? Has the homeless problem been solved? Has the drug problems in our society been solved? Do our roads have no potholes? Are we getting new bridges and high speed rail everywhere? Is our food any safer than countries without such draconian government laws?
Related – the Washington state DOT is not allowed to consider their employees own work performance when deciding who to promote. As someone who has built businesses, that is the most insane thing I have ever heard. How else do you decide who to promote? This is what happens when government employees unions are allowed to negotiate directly with politicians… the taxpayer gets completely hosed.
Related – a 20 year old boy attending Brown University and spending $95,000 a year on their tuition pointed out that there is more than one administrator for every two students, and the university’s reaction is to attempt to prosecute and expel him rather than fix the problem – https://nypost.com/2025/05/05/us-news/brown-student-who-sent-administrators-a-doge-email-says-its-unclear-what-they-actually-do/.
Related – President Trump was elected with a mandate of reducing the size of the federal government and getting rid of the waste. But the government employees unions are so powerful and well connected politically with courts and the far left media that almost no long term career employees have been fired and the few probationary employees that were fired are being reinstated. So much for democracy. The people who tried to help him such as Elon Musk have been universally pilloried by the far left press to the point that violent riots have been held at his Tesla stores and even the environmentally conscious people who bought his electric cars have been vandalized and assaulted.
Quite quickly we are seeing the parasites expand and outweigh the producers. When that happens, the whole system will collapse under it’s own weight and we will see famine and war here in America like never before.