The chickens are coming home to roost across the heartland of America. As harvest season approaches, our farmers, many of them Trump voters, are looking at a nonexistent market for their crops, especially corn and soybeans as a result of Trump's self imposed trade war.
There is moneÿ built into the budget bill to provide assistance (welfare) to farmers to compensate for the lost revenue from the crops they can't sell so that may save some from bankruptcy. Still, here we go with another case of Trump's rhetoric about "making America Great Again" not matching the reality of the results of his incompetent policies.
Tariffs are hurting farmers
Brown said one issue that rounds out all the problems farmers are facing: tariffs.
“I think the tariffs are the ice cream on the cake of a perfect storm,” said Brown. “When you try and sell a product, okay, U.S. soybeans leaving New Orleans without the tariff to China are cheaper than Brazilian soybeans, at the current market. But when you put the tariff on top of them, Brazilian beans are cheaper.”
What can be done to help farmers?
“In the short term, they have no choice but to mail us a check,” said Brown. “I don’t know a farmer that likes the check program. Nobody wants to take the taxpayer dollars, but nobody wants to go broke, nobody wants to lose everything. Long term, we have to have options, markets, and places to sell our product.”
Hundreds of farmers gathered in Brookland to speak with representatives of Arkansas leaders to share with them their urgent plight: the difficulties they face in farming today.
www.kait8.com
U.S. producers of corn and soybeans have sent dire warnings as prices for their crops have crashed in recent years while President Donald Trump’s trade war whipsaws farmers.
On Thursday, the National Corn Growers Association raised alarms about “the economic crisis hitting rural America, as commodity prices drop at a time when input costs remain at near-record highs.”
Corn prices have plunged more than 50% from their 2022 peak, while production costs are down just 3% in that span, translating to a loss of 85 cents per bushel, the NCGA said, adding that the outlook for next year is worse with even lower prices and higher costs.
The NCGA called on Congress and the Trump administration to boost demand, including via higher blends of ethanol and increased foreign market access.
A week before that, the American Soybean Association sent a letter to Trump, warning that “U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial precipice.”
"Prices continue to drop and at the same time our farmers are paying significantly more for inputs and equipment."
fortune.com
America's farmers have been pushing chains uphill for years, decades now. Tariff issues are only one part of the challenges;
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Ag Reform Must Put Farmers First
To activists who recognize the dangers of pesticides and other industrial agriculture practices, the necessary policy seems quite obvious. These practices should be banned—the sooner the better. It is a clear moral decision.
From the perspective of the growers, however, such policies pose an existential threat by making an already-hard job impossible. Farmers and ranchers face crushing debt, irrational regulations, perverse incentives, rising input costs, and falling commodity prices. Some 140,000 farms have disappeared over the past five years, and many others survive only because their owners work second jobs. As the average age of the American farmer nears 58, too few of the next generation are entering the profession, which is beset by addiction, depression, suicide, and cancer. All is not well in farm country.
Understandably, regulators and Congress members from farm states are reluctant to consider any policy that would worsen farmers’ already dire conditions. However, in their zeal to protect the agricultural industry,
they overlook the ironic truth that the very system they protect is destroying rural America.
That system includes pesticides, factory farms, Department of Agriculture (USDA) and state regulations, debt financing, subsidies, crop insurance, commodity markets, farm consolidation, consumer habits, and food processors, each of which has co-evolved with the rest into a barely functioning interdependency.
It is impractical to change one of these elements without changing all of them. Immersed in that system, many farmers feel stuck, unable to change, even if they want to.
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Today in the United States, a small but growing minority of farmers is proving that it is indeed possible to transition to low- or zero-chemical ways of farming that sacrifice neither yield nor prosperity. ...
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These innovators provide a proof-of-concept. Skeptics object that many of them serve niche and specialty markets, often, though not always, relying on direct-to-consumer sales rather than selling bulk commodities. But these markets need not be niche. We can evolve the food system in the direction that these innovators have established: shorter supply chains, smaller scale, more diverse crops, and a closer relationship with consumers.
To do that will require both a long-term vision of a regenerative agricultural system and immediate win-win steps toward it. Here are some examples:
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Farmers should not be punished for being locked into a dysfunctional system. They need an exit ramp: a practical transition pathway that grows their prosperity, unleashes their creativity, and enables them to grow healthy food they feel good about. When we realize that public health, soil health, and the economic health of farmers are inseparable, the regenerative agriculture movement will be unstoppable.
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