This has been an extraordinary year to live on a farm; this has been a year that nearly every farmer would choose a very different adjective to describe what it means to make a living in agriculture.
As I watch combines working in fields all around me, I find myself pondering and worrying for the farmers running them.
My mind races back to the shocking realities facing farmers in the 1980s, when interest rates soared to unbelievable percentage numbers and crop commodities did not. I was a young editor of an agricultural newspaper and reached out to farmers on a daily basis, writing about their livelihood and the nightmarish challenges farm families were facing.
Today, farmers are faced with another set of stifling circumstances, again through no fault of their own, and all outside of their power to control it.
China has been taken out of the U.S. agricultural trade equation. After purchasing 54% of U.S. farm exports last year, China is dropping back to zero this year.
Those trade agreements, once lost, will be dang difficult to get back, and farmers know that better than anyone. Retaliatory tariffs hurt farmers almost overnight in the summer of 2018 when this same president handled badly what had at that time been enduring trade deals in overseas markets. Once lost, who suffers? Not the politicians moving chess pieces around on a map.
Family farms make up roughly 88% of all Ohio farms, and the horror of shrinking incomes and soaring input costs, once again, is making survival extremely difficult. No matter how tightly you run your ship, with prices below the cost of production, something has to change, and farmers don’t have a year or a decade to wait for that ship to turn around.
It’s so easy for people to forget, in a world of convenience, that our food comes from real people who rise before dawn and who labor with a love for the land — often multi-generational — that runs deeper than most can understand.
The truth is that in many rural states, counties and communities, it is farmers who pour a whole lot of money and sweat equity into keeping the landscape vibrant. Hardware stores, implement dealerships, feed and seed businesses, just to name a few, help to fund schools and keep such things as rural hospitals open.
The independent nature of farming has always been admired by those who dream of living it, but it is this very factor that makes surviving and thriving when impossible circumstances are created outside of one’s power so agonizingly difficult.
Bah. These farmers have been voting Republican forever, and they voted for Trump every chance they got. Even after he burned them the first term Farmers get subsidized by the big blue cities, and then say that when anybody else gets any, it’s “socialism.” Now they are — finally — paying the price for voting MAGA. I say not a penny for any of them. Let them go under and then Wall Street equity and Big Ag will pounce and get their land. They are literally reaping what they sowed. They voted for it!