Save Our Farms

We just have to save our farms, because without the food grown on those farms, no one will have anything to eat. At least not unless they go out to eat, and I mean go out to Mexico or Canada or France.

Too flippant, you say? And what about all the things Donald Trump has done lately? And the economy, and racism and our Senate doing almost nothing for the past two years?

Well, all of that can wait until I stock up on canned goods, or at least until I figure out just what is going on with our farms.

I know two things. First the weather has ruined the chance of growing a lot of things this year in a lot of places, and it is really difficult to cope with changing climate and flooding when you don’t believe the climate is changing.

Second, the tariffs that Donald Trump has imposed, or is threatening to impose, or imposing and eliminating and re-imposing are forcing buyers in other countries to look elsewhere for the food they need, and - trust me on this - soybeans from the Untied States are very much like soybeans grown in other countries. Only they are cheaper to buy from other place because of the tariff wars.

I know a third thing, too. We are giving billions of dollars in aid to farmers - make that to the people who own farms (which is a different thing) - and a lot of farmers are complaining that we are doing it the wrong way.

You didn’t know? Well, look it up. Or, just keep on reading, while I hit the highlights.

                                                   It Gets A Little Messy

Aid to farmers under our President’s emergency program is given based on the crops that are ruined because of the weather or because they can’t sell them. But, this year’s storms have made it impossible for farmers to plant certain crops, and the growing schedule is rigidly set by Mother Nature, who will not allow seeds to germinate unless certain conditions are met, and will kill those plants when the ground is flooded for too long.

So, farmers who can’t get their tractors into the muddy fields to plant seeds don’t qualify for as much federal aid. The Farm Bureau people want to change the aid formula so they will get paid for the crops they don’t plant, which is similar to another federal farm subsidy program. Don’t dwell on the details, because they can give non-farmers a headache.

Now, here’s the interesting part. I live in a part of the country where we still have a lot of farmers, many of whom have been farming the same land for generations. Now, some of the farms are smaller, because selling off a few acres to build houses is a fine way of getting the money to tide farmers over when times are bad.

Farms get smaller, too, when a farmer dies and has three children who each want to continue the family business and he leaves some of the land to each of them. Or, a farm can change its crop, and grow more profitable foods on fewer acres.

We once had potato fields stretching as far as the eye can see, and in some places those thousands of acres of farmland have been replaced by hundreds of acres of vineyards, which produce more money in a year than those potato farms generated in a decade.

Still, that story - which is probably known to a lot of people - ignores another development in farming, which is after all a business. You know, like your favorite baseball team is a business and the canned soup you get in the supermarket isn’t being produced because the company loves you and likes to see children smile. It too is a business.

Here’s where the situation gets a lot more complicated, unless you just like to think “Hey, let’s spend money and save our farmers. After all, we all have to eat.”

                                                          Why Is It So Hard?

The problem is that not all the farmers own the farms. That’s because the land has gotten too valuable. So, farmers lease the land they need each year.

One food industry writer pointed out that in 2017 the U S Department of Agriculture estimated that al least 30 percent of American farmland was leased. The USDA estimated that in a few years another 92 million acres of farmland would change hands - an area about the size of Montana - and much of it would go to investors.

And who are those absentee landlords making a profit off our struggling farmers? Well, the figures are a little hard to nail down, and statistics can lag by a couple of years. But, investors in New Zealand own about 18,000 acres (which is a nice number for a small country).

Overall, foreign buyers own about 25 million acres of U.S. farmland - about the size of the state of Virginia. Saudi Arabia and the UAE own 5,000 acres of farms in Arizona and California, and Italian buyers reportedly own more than 100,000 acres in Missouri.

In 2013, a company now called the WH Group - it had been Shuanghui Investment and Development, and was China’s biggest meat processing business - bought Smithfield Foods in a $7.1 billion deal, giving it more than 500 company-owned farms in the United States and contracts with another 2,000 independent pig-growning farms. Internationally, it picked up Smithfield's farms in Poland, Romania, Germany and the United Kingdom.

The W H Group is now the largest pork producer in the world, although the  new name does not have the beauty of the original Chinese one, whose characters "wan" and "zhou" represent eternity and continents.

Now - and I promise to get to my main point very soon - when the deal was made, Smithfield’s CEO pledged that the Chinese did not want to import Chinese pork into the United States,, but to export pork to China and other places. And, that is just what happened.

So, here’s the point. Just how much money should we give to the Chinese government which owns those hundreds of farms because they cant grow feed for the pigs? And how much money do we give to the New Zealand landlords from whom our farmers must lease land to get their government aid?

And, best of all, just how much money do we give to the W H Group when it faces higher prices when it tries to sell American pork in Italy or Great Britain because we are in a tariff war?

It’s amazing what you can ponder once you go beyond name-calling. Perhaps Sarah Sanders will answer all those questions at one of her press conferences.