<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nFederal funding cuts and freezes, along with staffing shortages at the Agriculture Department, have also been rippling across the U.S. agriculture industry. Farmers say they rely on grants and loans from the Agriculture Department to help make their products more affordable for U.S. consumers and weather the natural volatility in the market for agriculture commodities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Gilkerson tries to figure out a new market for her farm\u2019s freeze-dried fruits, another group of West Virginia farmers has also been caught up in funding cuts to a separate Agriculture Department program to help promote local foods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A group of farmers had been working to launch a brand of West Virginia-grown products called Appalachian Cellar. After months of work, they were preparing to begin distributing the brand to grocery stores and other food distributors when the Agriculture Department told them their funding had been cut off as of Jan. 19, the day before Trump entered office. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got 31 farmers who are pissed off,\u201d said Spencer Moss, executive director of the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition, who was working on launching the line of products. \u201cWe are rounding the corner into the planting season, and we are supposed to be ramping up, but we are not. We are unable to ramp up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not only will the group not be getting funding going forward for expenses it had coming up, but it\u2019s unclear whether it will get reimbursed, as planned, for $100,000 in expenses related to the grant it had already paid for, Moss said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is the economy of rural America. West Virginia is a wholly rural state, and so developing this agriculture economy in the state is extremely important,\u201d she said. \u201cThese farmers pay their property taxes, they\u2019re business owners, a lot of times they\u2019re commissioners or school board members. These are the drivers that keep rural communities alive. So it feels like a divestment in rural communities across the board.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seth Kroeck, a blueberry farmer in Maine, said he received a $50,000 grant to spread 200,000 cubic yards of mulch on his wild blueberries to help improve his crop yields. He has the truck, the fuel and the manpower lined up to spread the mulch and has to get started in the coming weeks as the planting season gets underway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But he\u2019s unsure whether he will actually get reimbursed by the Agriculture Department, because he knows of several other farmers still waiting to get paid for equipment they purchased under Agriculture Department grants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt has really sent a chill among a lot of farmers,\u201d Kroeck said. \u201cYou sign a contract with the USDA, you expect that they\u2019re going to pay on it. You would never expect that they\u2019re not going to fulfill their end of the deal. It makes me worry in a broader sense about where we\u2019re heading. So much of what we do with each other is based on that basic trust, and to have that be shattered is very, very worrisome.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s uncertainty as farmers are trying to make decisions at the start of the planting season in many parts of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Virginia, John Boyd is unsure whether his loan from the Agriculture Department will come through in time for him to buy the seeds he needs to begin planting his soybean crops for this year. Boyd typically gets an Agriculture Department loan in the spring to help cover some of the cost of planting until he can harvest the crops in the fall and use the proceeds to repay the loan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But so far, the loan money hasn\u2019t come through, and he has been unable to get any update from the Agriculture Department about <\/strong>whether or when it will be available. With just days until he needs to start putting his seeds in the ground, Boyd <\/strong>said, he\u2019s urgently trying to negotiate a payment plan with his seed supplier or find another way to finance the expense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s planting season, and there\u2019s a cloud of uncertainty among the agriculture industry with this president,\u201d said Boyd, who is president of the National Black Farmers Association. \u201cI\u2019ve got real debt; I\u2019ve got real expenses. But I also have the will to farm in some sort of way. I can\u2019t tell you how, but I am making calls and trying to put some things in place to get through this crisis the president has put us in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Soybean prices, which have already been falling amid a glut of supply in the market as production has ramped up globally, have been tumbling in recent years, and he worries they will fall further in a trade war with China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s alarming here to me as a leader in the farm community and civil rights work is that it\u2019s the farmer that is the first getting affected, and it was the farmer that delivered for this president,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cThey were all in for Trump, and they are the first in line to be affected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prices for soybeans, like other agricultural products, including corn, wheat and pork, are set not by the individual farmers but by a wider commodities market, which factors in the global supply and demand. If demand for U.S. agriculture products from a major buyer, like China, goes down as a result of tariffs, so can the price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn order to get a fair price, you need a good, steady market, and the president is disrupting the market,\u201d Boyd said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Farmers have been through Trump\u2019s trade wars before in 2018 and 2019, when he imposed tariffs on China, which retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. farm products, sending sales tumbling. In response, Trump set up a payment program during his first term to compensate some of the affected farmers. The amount of payments doled out was about equivalent to the revenue the United States collected from the tariffs on Chinese imports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump hasn\u2019t said whether he will implement a similar payment plan again. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Trump\u2019s moves are intended to improve the longer-term picture for farmers by ultimately creating a more level playing field overseas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe understands that the best way to get our farmers, our ranchers and our fishermen’s produce and products in the rest of the world \u2014 which they block, India blocks our farmers, all these countries block our farmers \u2014 the way to grow it is to make deals with them where they have to understand the power of the U.S. economy,\u201d Lutnick said in a Bloomberg TV interview Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the meantime, farmers are trying to figure out how to pay for their current bills and how to cut costs to lessen their losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Iowa, Hemesath, who is on the board of the National Corn Growers Association and president of Farmers for Free Trade, said he\u2019s <\/strong>bracing for the possibility of losing money on his crops this year if there is no change in policy in the coming months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re used to the ups and downs in the markets. There\u2019s no doubt about that, but we need to be looking for more markets and building on the markets that we already have,\u201d he said. \u201cSo long term, we definitely have to get this resolved to stay viable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jennifer Gilkerson never imagined that her West Virginia farm\u2019s freeze-dried fruits would get caught up in political fights in Washington, D.C. But last Friday, she learned that funding for a U.S. Agriculture Department program that helps schools and food banks buy products from local farmers like her had been cut. Without those federal dollars, Gilkerson no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":39716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1155],"tags":[32682,32683,8318,32648,1230],"class_list":["post-39715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-freeze-dried-fruit","tag-funding-cuts","tag-political-struggle","tag-trade-war","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39717,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39715\/revisions\/39717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}