Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Large farms, food processors and restaurant operators have much brighter prospects than their smaller counterparts grappling with the coronavirus crisis.
The big picture: They have access to capital markets, including the trillions of dollars being injected into the fixed-income markets by the Federal Reserve.
- The top three meat processors — Tyson Foods, JBS and Cargill — account for about ⅔ of the market and therefore count as being too big to fail. Hence President Trump's decision to invoke the Defense Production Act to keep their facilities running.
- Big farms have a bright future selling to China, which has promised to buy more than $40 billion of U.S. agricultural goods and which is facing a severe domestic pork shortage.
The bottom line: The total amount that we eat isn't going down. If the food we're eating isn't coming from small farmers, it's coming from large ones.
Go deeper: Coronavirus breaks the food supply chain