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For context: if you remember 2022 when I kept saying "The global wheat shortage is not real. Stop panic-buying & driving up prices" & I was right? (Foreign Policy does! https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/12/russia-ukraine-war-wheat-global-food-supply-panic/)

This is me telling you "the US farm situation right now is very bad. We SHOULD worry about this."

Trump's trade wars will push fert & fuel prices up- for ex, 80% of the US's potash fertilizer comes from Canada. Trump just tariff'd it.

And US farmers will lose lots of sales as trade wars shut off their export markets.

Farmers knew this bc he ran on it!

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-canadian-farmers-face-soaring-fertilizer-prices-amid-trump-trade-war-2025-03-07/

Last year I had a sit-down with a major farm lobby rep.

I said "Hey, we both know Trump'll stab you in the back. You know he doesn't care if your farms are viable or not. He'll wreck your livelihood just because he's feeling mad about China that day."

And he said "Yeah, we know!"

"So why do y'all keep supporting him?"

He mumbled something about how there are "other benefits" to being in the Trump coalition that his farmers & industry group members "didn't want to miss out on." So they prefer to "support Trump in public, and negotiate out their differences quietly."

Now "other benefits" can mean a lot of things: tax cuts, deregulation, etc.

But tax cuts & deregulation only help so much. They're useless if you lose your farm to trade wars!

What *does* keep your farm afloat during a trade war, though? Free money!

So that's the "payoff" part of this $10B farm bailout.

Now the wild part isn't that an industry would agree to a cash-for-support deal. That's corrupt. But it's ~politics as usual.

The wild part is how this payout says "Policymakers & the farm sector have given up on actually growing food."

Think about it. To cope with trade wars, logically, US farmers should grow way less grain. They should grow more of the things that we currently import, like fruits & veggies, for domestic consumption.

I mean come on. Even Trump knows that.

A farm sector that's serious about the job would be burning rubber to pivot to produce right now.

But that urgency just isn't there.

It kinda feels like the US farm sector is treating this like a joke. Or we've just given up on doing our job. You know, feeding people!

There's very little appetite in the US farm sector to grow more produce, even though it's way more lucrative than grains.

Why? It's not because of subsidies!

Produce is just more work & investment to farm than grain is. You have to install irrigation, hire people, have coolers, etc.

So what's this $10B for? Is it for transitioning to produce? Installing irrigation? Rural housing so pickers have somewhere to sleep? Coolers & handling facilities?

Nope.

Just a bonus for growing grain as usual.

This is a very big problem!

You can do a trade war & cut off food imports. OR you can have a domestic farm sector that's given up on feeding its own country.

You can't do both!

But we are! We're doing both!

I know everything's on fire right now, but this needs to be a much bigger deal than it is.

If this is how the US farm sector is rolling- along with other issues like forbidding poultry farms from vaccinating flocks against bird flu- we're looking at a recipe for some hunger times.

And at the bottom of it all is apathy & frankly learned helplessness in the farm sector.

Which is totally uncalled for!

US family farmers have made more money than non-farmers every single year since 1998. Yes, after you take out farm debts & expenses.

https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/DataFiles/48870/table13December2024.xlsx?v=24334

There are a lot of good livings to be made, if you treat farming with real respect. Like it's a real job.

Taking political payoffs is NOT treating agriculture like a real job.

And voting for trade wars that hurt your bottom line, then robbing the taxpayer to make up for it?

What a joke.

I'm at a loss to convey how deep we're in it right now. To see the dumpster fire we're headed into, you have to know how farms, food, & money actually work.

And we don't even see it coming, bc US media has done a terrible job of reporting on ag for decades. I'm so sorry. You deserve better.

Well anyway, amongst other reasons, that's why I'm making content about basic financial literacy in agriculture.

It's kinda wild to have your farm sector on fire, and the response is... make videos on "farms as a business 101."

But that's where we're at! We need transparency now more than ever!

I love working in agriculture. I want it to succeed & be a real staff of life.

And what we're doing right now? This ain't it.

@sashin Sorry, 1) the Mastodon UI interface is trash so I can't tell which post you're talking about and 2) no, there also really just aren't resources talking about most of what I'm talking about here.

That's why I said in the thread "the press has done a terrible job of helping the public understand agriculture"! That's why I'm doing this on social media mate!

@sarahtaber oh by these I meant farms, food and money

@sarahtaber

Even if Trump bails out farming massively (there's a USSR joke to be made there somewhere) that is bound to hit a wall because his own administration is irrationally at war with cheap labour, a crucial element of affordable farming of many products.

He may find that it's far more difficult to deport people from the big cities to the countryside, than it is to let people voluntarily join the US workforce in the farming sector as they have done for more than a century.

@billseitz

@sarahtaber

All these ideas have stamped on them the unmistakable signature of an economically and financially illiterate administration trying to force its will on economic reality (there's another USSR joke to be made there).

@billseitz

@Melf Hi Melf, I have worked as a manual field laborer & can tell you "haha Americans will never do that job" is just not true. That's a copout line that people use to cover their butts when they don't know how to run a proper business.

Unfortunately that's a lot of people. Ah well, their problem not mine.

@ruby They already have that though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@sarahtaber @ruby Republicans have convinced them that if other people have rights it's taking some away from them. Trump wants them to feel like aggrieved victims so they will stay mad at others instead of him.

@foaylward To be seen. The chatter I'm hearing is "Don't worry, this is just the first tranche, there'll be more!" The first Trump admin certainly had multiple multi-billion payoffs to farmers.

Also, fwiw, most small family farmers in the US are millionaires with above-average household income. Even if the whole $10B went to small family farms, it still wouldn't be poverty relief by a long shot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-household-income-and-characteristics

@sarahtaber @foaylward did you even read this table? The average farm in the US loses money. Most farms have off farm income, and all the “wealth” is in the land and equipment, which the banks are very happy to repossess when there are many bad years in a row, or when the farmer goes too big out of fear of going home.

The system sucks. All those tractors, chemicals, and monocrops are terrible for the environment as well as the bottom line.

@Nonya_Bidniss You're not wrong but a lot of US farmers are living at the level where they also expect a direct financial payoff from their votes- vibes alone aren't enough.

@sarahtaber Ughhh

@AccordionBruce @sarahtaber

@PeachMcD @sarahtaber
But a lot of Canadians hate Trump right now, so if his obvious connections to #Poilievre and the Conservatives can be kept clear, people may reject him

The election is April 28 so at least we don’t have four years of campaigning