Will farmers get a better deal?

Yesterday I had occasion to take a back roads drive, mostly through Benton and Morrison Counties. Plenty of country folks are still displaying their Trump signs and flags. None of my business, what they put in their yards.

A farm economy awash in an unprecedented infusion of public dollars directed by the Trump administration could face a reckoning soon. Close to $40 billion in agriculture-related payments this year mask structural problems in a badly broken market that doesn’t pay most farmers enough to continue farming. New leadership in the White House and congressional agriculture committees should act to fix a policy framework that has greatly benefited global grain and meat companies at the expense of farmers before these ad hoc Trump payments disappear.

The massive public payments over the last three years help conceal how little farmers have made from the market. The USDA projects median farm income in 2020 will be $934, up from $296 in 2019. Median farm income has been negative from 1996 through 2018. Farm debt is forecast to rise to a record $433 billion in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service. The farm asset to debt ratio is up 14%, the highest since 2003 after rising steadily over the last eight years. Approximately 8% of loans are in poor condition, double the rate in 2014, according to the Farm Credit Council.

It is off-farm jobs, often coming with a health care plan, that keep most farm families going. - IATP

Farmers are being crushed, screwed over, and plenty of other things by Trump

You probably saw that last year Minnesota’s median farm income was the lowest it's been in the 23 years that the U. of Minn. has been tracking it. A couple more items:

Among those who’re learning about the “truthy-ness” of The Donald are farmers who voted for him, having bought his campaign promise to restore farm prosperity.

Once in office, though, he quickly sold them out, throwing a hissy-fit of a trade war with China that ended up slapping U.S. farmers by lowering the already low prices they get for their crops...

Actions speak louder than words, of course, so on March 11 Trump took actions to express his true love for farmers: He whacked $3.6 billion from the safety-net programs that offer a measure of relief to hard-hit producers when crop prices crash. Revealing his plutocratic core, his cuts specifically targeted programs that benefit small farmers — a deliberate manipulation meant to drive more families off the land and increase corporate monopolization of agriculture. - OurFuture.org

The reference is to the Trump budget proposal; cuts like that are highly unlikely to get through Congress. But the point is that that’s where Traitor Trump's head is at.

Some large equipment manufacturers, including John Deere and Caterpillar, announced almost immediately after the tariffs were implemented last summer that they would raise their prices to adjust for the higher price of steel and aluminum imports. It’s not just large manufacturers, though—small, locally based equipment manufacturers have also had to raise prices or look elsewhere for steel. In Montana, a horse-trailer manufacturer was forced to hike prices by about 20 percent last summer because of the tariffs. Bank of America Merrill Lynch downgraded John Deere’s stock in February, citing “a real risk to farm equipment demand” if the trade war continues.

Many farmers are precluded from buying new agricultural equipment because of a combination of higher prices and lower profits. But that puts them in a catch-22. Farmers replace their equipment only every five to seven years. Those who were going to replace it this year and now can’t afford to are forced to repair it instead. And because steel costs are up, so too are the costs of replacement parts. - The Atlantic