The United States’ agricultural secretary said that American farmers are the casualties in the trade war with China. “You can’t pay the bills with patriotism,” Sonny Perdue said of the struggles facing farmers stuck in the crossfire of tariffs.
Farmers are struggling with flooding and concerning weather conditions this year which are magnifying their financial problems. American farmers have also been grappling with bankruptcies and suicides and now all of that is compounded with the introduction of the economically disastrous trade war.
In an interview yesterday, Perdue acknowledged that farmers are taking most of the proverbial shots fired in this trade war. “I think they are one of the casualties with trade disruption, yes,” Perdue told CNN according to NBC News. “We knew going in that when you flew the penalty flag on China, the retaliation, if it came, would be against the farmer.” The real question then, is why were people not speaking out against the damages they knew would happen?
“I’ve told the president — and the president understands — you can’t pay the bills with patriotism,” Perdue told CNN. “We know that and certainly he knows that. That’s why he’s trying to supplement the damage they’re having from trade disruptions with market facilitation.” But all reports indicate that not only is the “market facilitation” or bailout not enough, but it’s also only benefiting those with political connections. Not many small-town farmers are feeling any relief.
The Trump administration last month unveiled a $16 billion aid package for farmers to offset losses from the 10-month trade war with China. Payment rates to farmers would be determined by where they farm rather than what crops they grow which is even more horrifying considering China’s retaliatory ban on importing soybeans from the U.S. The government is doing far more damage than they are good with the trade war.
The U.S. farmers are now seeing soybeans rot in storage thanks to the trade war. At one time, China imported 60% of the soybeans grown in the U.S. That’s all changed and unfortunately, far too many patriotic Americans are defending this devastation done to our farmers instead of looking past party politics.
Most farming in the USA is done on an industrial scale. Agri-business is the big complainer about the current tariffs. Most Mom & Pop farmers, like most of my ancestors, were squeezed out long ago. China & other countries took advantage of the USA for decades. The USA is demanding FAIR trade now. We don’t plan to capitulate.
The only farmers screwed by the trade war are the ones who rely solely on exporting their product,
Perhaps not so prudent to rely on a foreign entity.
Have a few friends in the biz, all only sell to US market,
They have bigger worries from the weather
Nail,
You were a professional farmer, am I correct?
Federal law/policies pushed you out of the business?
My point is whenever the Democrat government
gets involved Democrats screw it up.
As for soybean farmers this should be a banner year,
as nobody has planted enough feed corn due to weather.
Chinese will be out to buy pigs big-time! They are the world’s
#1 consumer of pork. They feed their pigs soybeans. They had to kill a very large portion of their population of pigs due to a disease, so they would not have bought soybeans anyway.
Rellik
Correction
Whenever GOVERNMENT gets involved they screw things up.
Those who can not do on their own get a government job to tell people what to do…
Screw em,
Who is John Galt!
I’m sure us island guys irritate the mainland guys.
We are well prepped and can share our experiences.
We can’t drive or walk away. So what we say is golden.
Ketchupondemand is better than Selco.
Your farming/survival BS is good. keep it up.
We live at the edge.
Rellik- I’m sure once you stop receiving shipments of goods and fuel, you’d be singing a different tune. Prep all you want, you rely on us “mainland” guys. Pray tell- is your island prepped to live off of coconuts? Cuz you’re damn sure to run out of SPAM! LOL!
Mainlanders receive shipments of fuel, or live at the stinky refinery.
Coconuts are a source of bio-diesel, have millions of industrial uses, and are sold in your stores.
We don’t know where the pigs in your Spam actually come from, or if you will continue to receive shipments of it, on a reliable basis, but pigs, livestock, and fish, and are found in the islands.
Islanders actually expressed some concern about independence, knowing they could starve without big business, that could name any price.
Mainlanders seem to think they are living safely within the belly of the beast, though constantly complaining about supply chain issues.
It’s the same mercantilism, divided by jurisdictions, instead of by water.
If it’s more than you can walk, you are on the edge of somewhere.
Mostly the big AG sells overseas. Mini local farmers grow feed and many other useful domestic products like ethanol from corn. Up to 10% blends. Not good for chainsaws or 2 cycle engines though. Get non ethanol gas when running those tools.
As I see it more supply than demand, then food prices should drop for the average American right? Imagine those in China starving now and inflation of less foo imports. Eat your rice a roni..
Yes, when they started importing pineapples into Hawaii from Viet Nam, undercutting island prices.. Things happen.
How about we send out excess food to Venezuela? Opps that right, we are required to hate them so says the CIA peddler shills of propaganda. Biggest killer of US Jobs is perpetual Global War and the destruction of full countries and their world wide markets, over a whim.
@TharSheBlows, you are correct about Venezuela and our greatest export, War.
A question for parents. Have your children ever seen US planes dropping food for hungry children?
Silly me, just an old man showing his age.
Farmers are like Thurston and Lovey Howell and have wine collections, in mansions made after the Georgian, antebellum style or looking like Catholic, Indian schools. Fortress fences are comparable to a border crossing (at the port of entry, where you’re supposed to be crossing.)
Year round labor is performed by rural tenants who are allowed to park there. That’s all they get. Wild eyes, one arm shorter, conspicuous speech impediment. Mandingo-type to keep company with the faggy owner who has solar shields and golf shirts and still uses race words like a Kentucky Colonel.
It will succeed or fail, within the first couple of years, based on a harvest, performed by prison laborers or wetbacks on white buses.
A picking company pays for the rights.
Aid packages are generally given to champagne communists, gaming the system.
This “Trade War” has been going on since 1994.
The Communist Chinese targeted entire sectors of American Industry and succeeded in the destruction of our means of production for those sectors.
They steel our Intellectual property, Spy on and steel our Technology, Demand technology that they cant steel as a part of any orders they place, And are using that technology to build a military that their Generals threaten us with.
We Finally have a President who fights back,
Why cant we, as a country support that? Why are we so blind to where this is heading?
I would say we deserve what we get but that lets Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education (indoctrination) off the hook
Hate to break it Mac Slavo but American farmers were targeted and destroyed by the bankers in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They were dead and buried by the farm loan scam. What was left of farming the world over has been wiped out by communist government policies and weather manipulation. Only guys left in farming are big agra boys and some hit and miss family farmers who have been holding on to their dwindling farms by the skin of their teeth.
Look at the Amish plowing their fields with horse and plow.
All they are worried about is the WEATHER! The factory farms are hurting because they got greedy. Spent millions on farm equipment they couldn’t pay cash for.
Farming is a gamble and all farmers know this, (or they should.)
Gambling is not a guaranteed income. Buy crop insurance or quit whining.
Look to the past to see who were successful, not to those with the biggest fantasies for the future. Mother Nature is in control.
Great website Mac!
American Farmers have been the Casualties Of BANKERS since companies were forced to move overseas. Otherwise, they would have to pay higher TAXES and face many ridiculous REGULATIONS.
Farmers are free to plant what I personally will buy. They don’t have to plant only what foreigners want to buy.
The most successful small farmers plant a wide variety of crops. There are farms around here that plant potatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables. They even grow hemp here. One of my older relatives is so proud of the hemp field behind his house.
If the big guys go out of business, it will leave room for the small farmers to come back in. Some of my wife’s relatives are big into farming and would love to have their own farms.
Before the modern era of subsidies and entitlements, a farmer got nothing from the taxpayer. Return to those grand days of old.
How many seasons did Little House on the Prairie- Charles Ingles lose his entire crop to the weather. Were there billions in aid for him.
Some farmers aren’t farmers they are parasites demanding shit from the taxpayer. If you made a mistake, own it. What, you think just because you made $$$$ one year that it is some kind of fucking GOD law that guarantees you even more $$$$ each year?
Uck, with today’s parasitic mindset, the manufacture of wagon wheels would still be demanding an annual free money from the bozo-taxpayers because automobiles destroyed their GODLY GUARANTEED business over 100 years ago. LOL
No more handouts.
trump just met with china and said they will be buying from us again. whoever china was buying from left a void in the market, why not sell there? will refunds be made if markets are found? I appreciate cheap food and fuel, and we should benefit first especially since we subsidize most corporate farms.
One of my good friends was a farmer, Virgil Myers,rode his horse till he was 89 and lived to the ripe old age of 94. He owned a lot of land, thousands of acres, and the Government paid him to keep some of it in native grass instead of planting crops. I asked him why they would do that, he smiled and said ” I don’t know, but if they’re foolish enough to do it I’m going to capitalize on it.”
I can not recall any time in American History where farmers were being successful and thriving.
They are ALWAYS struggling, downtrodden and on the verge of bankruptcy.
My Uncle about 87 yrs old and was a Midwest farmer most of his life says, “Farmers are the Biggest Gamblers on the Planet”
Well the propaganda campaign certainly worked on you JS.
The American farmer almost cannot fail. They are a government subsidized oligopoly with guaranteed rates of return on top of failure insurance. The American farmer is the closest thing to a sure bet in existence. The farmers I know endow scholarships.
If they were not successful and thriving this far into American history, they would be extinct.
government subsidized
I call bullshit on that.
My parents grew grapes and they had to give 10% to the government storehouses. They were subsidizing the government.
This law was just recently struck down by the supermen court because the government was taking property without compensation.
Since you are incapable of self education.
ht tps://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-equal-73-percent-of-producer-returns-says-new-report/
ht2tps://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/08/14/mapping-the-u-s-farm-subsidy-1-million-club/
h ttps://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/agricultural-subsidies
There’s lots more where those came from. All you have to do is look.
j said, “My parents grew grapes and they had to give 10% to the government storehouses.”
I thought it was an interesting factoid.
I would be interested to know whether the production quota was a condition of the subsidy, though.
If I recall, there seems to be a $100,000/yr grant for “attempting agriculture”, now.
bullshit. first off they aint farmers they are agribuisnessmen who grow commodities and make the best money from brown envelopes. And the 2019 crop will not hit the market till its harvested. The 2018 crop should have been sold before Trumps tariffs happened. Putting all their eggs in one basket is what causes farmers problems. Its a business you not guaranteed a profit. Fuck those greedy water pumping chemical spraying GMO planting parasites. I hope they all go bust. The irrigation pumped the Ogalla aquifer dry. and now that land is considered frontier because it has so few people per square mile. The irrigation is depleteing the Sparta Aquifer. The elevation in the delta near Stuttgart Ar. has dropped 50 feet. They keep having to deepen the irrigation wells. and they raise billions upon billions of mosquitos. Tariffs are the least of the big agri commoditys problems. They got too durn big for their britches and bought too much debt. The threat of Tariffs certainly changed the Mexican goverments mind about the illegals.
Old Guy is right. Today’s ‘American Farmers’ are Big Corporate’ in bed with the government that created them. For whatever reasons farmers sold their liberty to the central government, much like most of us.
Guess which party is primarily responsible for creating Big Corporate? And Old Guy mentioned evil GMO. In 2016 guess which party Monsanto supported in WASHINGTON? B-I-N-G-O-! Republicans by a whopping 77 to 23% margin!
It’s called corporatism, a fancy name for fascism. We don’t need GMO food! And we don’t need Washington.
A guy I went to school with his father owned 200 acres of land free and clear. grew some beans & corn and hay. had some beef cows. Well the dad made a living. Then He died. The son sold the cows. the hay and hay equipment. Bought a bigger tractor. bulldozed the fences and trees. and planted the entire farm with winter wheat. Made a bumper crop. However it had garlic in it. Would cost more than it was worth to clean the garlic & trash. So he bought feeder pigs and fed the wheat to the pigs and fattened them. and lost money. So he get a government guaranteed loan. rents more land bigger newer equiptment and eventually lost everything. And blames everything and everyone except the guy he sees in the mirror.
Early America 1630’s everybody was a Farmer. Grow Food or Die. The Indians taught them about the “Mound Gardens”, dig a hole fill it with a few fish, then cover with dirt and plant. Build many small mounds and plant. Then plant beans with big leaf cover to keep the weeds down on the mound. Think Big Ag could catch on with these tips and stop using all the cancerous pesticide chemicals. Naw…… My family came to Boston from England in 1638 into Boston Harbor. This is what how lived then in the video below.
Good History Vid -1 hr-14 Mins
Bedford Historical Society – Survival: Boston 1630-1635
ht tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o56EwDcibN8
This same thing happened in 1980 when Jimmy Carter cut off grain shipments to USSR. Lots of heart ache. That trouble lasted at least till the early 1990s. I went to northern Missouri to look at some land that was priced at $300 an acre in 1992. Didn’t buy but should have. The rub is that most farmers carry considerable debt. Too much debt is the kiss of death.
Another installment of “Total Mindless Misleading Bullspit” by Mac “Bullspit” Slavo for your mind numbing pleasure.
Bullshit. Looks like you’re allowed to write the word bullshit.