Trump blocks on farm funding still in limbo

Some of the funding will probably be allowed to happen before much longer. But other farmers could well end up permanently screwed.

On inauguration day, President Trump signed a series of executive orders that included directives to roll back Biden-era climate policies and projects. A subsequent broad pause in funding was stopped by a judge and later rescinded, and a judge ruled yesterday that the administration had failed to comply with the court order.

It’s unclear exactly how that process is linked to what’s happening at USDA, but farm groups across the country report that the agency has stopped their disbursements and has been silent about when the pause might end. Policy pros in D.C. say the assessment of grants and programs for links to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is likely part of the reason for the delay, while other farm grants are tied to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Trump is specifically targeting.

For example, farmers who received Renewable Energy Assistance Program (REAP) grants to install solar arrays on their land are left in limbo; so are those with conservation grants through popular programs including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which got an infusion of cash through the IRA.

But the pause in Climate-Smart Commodities grants is having particularly wide-reaching impacts, since the investment was so large, the program was just getting off the ground, and thousands of farms—from small dairies in the Northeast to large commodity grain operations in the Midwest—are involved. - Civil Eats

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

Trump trade war farm bailout keeps favoring the fat cats

As is noted later in this article, substantial sums are even finding their way to city slickers who wouldn't know how to plant a petunia.

EWG today released new USDA data, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that show that the biggest, richest farmers continue to get the most MFP money.

Updated information in EWG’s Farm Subsidy Database show that from Aug. 19 to Oct. 31, MFP payments were about $6 billion, bringing the total for 2018 and 2019 to $14.5 billion. Of the payments since August, the top 10 percent of recipients – the largest, most profitable industrial-scale farms in the country – got half.

Three of these farming fat cats got more than $1 million each. Forty-five got more than $500,000 each, and 514 got more than $250,000, which under the program’s rules is supposed to be the limit any single recipient can get.

The richest of the rich, the top 1 percent of recipients, received 13 percent of payments. That’s an average payment of more than $177,000. But the bottom 80 percent of recipients, including small farmers, got an average payment of $5,136. - Environmental Working Group

This article, from Mother Jones, gets into Democratic presidential candidates' positions on food and farms.

Weirdness in Round 2 of Trump farm bailout

Happened yesterday:

The U.S. government will pay American farmers hurt by the trade war with China between $15 and $150 per acre in an aid package totaling $16 billion, officials said on Thursday, with farmers in the South poised to see higher rates than in the Midwest. - Reuters

The "weirdness" is political. Why would they send more to the safely red states of the South, than to the much more iffy (to say the least, for Republicans in 2020) Midwest?

Here's more information. Things are being figured differently this time around, and apparently that's what's leading to the notable geographic differences.

In other words, political calculation is not overtly the #1 factor here. What's best for corporate ag profits is. That's my inexpert take, based on what I've seen so far, anyway.