'I've Never Seen Anything Like It': Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits
Sure you have, it was called Trump's first term.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/farmers-harmed-by-trump-policiesOpen linkView original on lemmy.world558
Comments121
They're giving him 18 MONTHS?? For fuck sake, these people Do. Not. Learn.
It’s only 24 months. I bet it won’t even take the whole 36 months. Just a quick and easy definitely less than 48 months.
“He needs a third term…”
They didn't recover a large part of their soy bean market during Biden's administration where China picked back up some of the ag products and now they lost all of the market. They're idiots if they think that this will recover any of their markets at any significant part this time around.
Once China develops a buying source they aren't likely to ever return. Why would they?
What do they even see as a positive outcome of the tariff shenanigans?
That more Americas will.. uhh... buy tofu, I guess?? Enough to make up for the entire Asia markets?
They didn't learn in his first term. No way they'll learn anything here either. These people are completely fucking stupid and never voted for him based on any kind of intelligence.
He's not trying to learn anything, he just wanted an excuse to kick the can down the road 18 months.
This is a farmer. Complaining about his situation now.
Unless he’s confident of a bailout, there may be no 18 months from now. wtf would he want to kick the can down the road?
What hope do we have when a leopard is eating someone’s face and their reaction is they trust the leopard and are willing to let it continue another year and a half? What does it take for them to make the connection?
Hopefully they are thinking of the midterms...if we have elections and the GOP gets whiplashed we just might be able to stop the worst of Trump. Imagine we get say 51 democrats in the sesnate along with a majority in the house that's healthly.
I seriously doubt any election at this point will be free and fair.
How much does Congress actually matter when we are already in a de facto dictatorship?
Congress has more power than the president, in all cases. They could revoke the national emergency powers tomorrow if they chose to. He's only getting to play dictator because congressional republicans are abdicating their responsibilities.
That said, it need to be a massive rebuke by the voters. 22 senate republican seats are up in 2026, enough to flip to a veto proof majority - but only 2 are realistically at play.
They could try.
The Republican small government, everyone
Why do I feel like these same people would say Biden’s economy was worse for them?
Yep! Nothing at all that could have been done about either of these situations. Just two natural disasters sent by god themself. What a shame.
"Oh geez it's not our fault, nothing could be done" they say as they overwhelming voted for Trump and said his policies would be better for them.
They learned nothing from his first term where he screwed them over by targeting immigrants and he just dialed that part up and added more.
Absolute morons.
Yeah but imagine voting for a black woman. The dem candidate could have promised them wild subsidies the likes the they never dreamed, but if it was “sleepy joe” or any other minority they disliked they still would have chosen Trump
It was in their control. They gave it up by voting against their own interests despite being told loudly
lol. lmao even.
Facts don't care about your feelings bitch!
Is there any american agricultural product that's at least a whole step above dirt?
When I see why the EU has serious issues with American agricultural products, I seriously doubt that superiority.
They probably do have a "superior product" it's just that the superiority comes from yield per acre. Not taste. Agricultural products are a massive industry in the US and bioengineering crops for higher drought tolerance and increased yield is the priority right now. The drawback to more soybean or corn or wheat per m² is nutritional density in the actual harvested product.
What I will say is that I've noticed a trend toward more sustainable farming practices even in the midwest where yield is your family's livelihood. More farmers are beginning to turn to no-till planting practices, pasture rotation, ground cover planting, etc. It's slow, but they're getting coerced by messaging from governmental bodies and research bodies in Illinois like the Department of Natural Resources, Dept. of Agriculture, University of Illinois, etc.
I got you.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240819082502/https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/farmers-brutalized-costs-through-roof-last-days-bidens-america
Where not even two years before:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/farmers-flourish-under-biden-see-recovery-trump-era-trade-wars-n1288044
Of course this is fine for them.
The consequences don't just effect one side. Musk now has his own town, Starbase, Texas. Marc Andreeson isn't far behind.
There is no being smug, the precedents will have far reaching effects.
We can set our own precedents just like we had to with company towns in the 1800s. I heard about a man named Luigi who supposedly created a similar precedent in the modern era.
all hail the mad kings
techbros reinventing monarchy
MARC ANDEREESON wanted to buy up farm land in Solarno CA, for his "California Forever" private owned town.
Thiel has expressed similar.
Musk has his own corporate town (Starbase, Texas).
Bezos has an area of Malaysia.
Zuck has parts of Hawaii.
Sam Altman invests in a private town in Honduras.
....they ALL want private towns, fifedoms to rule over in America. And by rule over, I mean SETTING THEIR OWN LAWS.
This is happening.
Anyways, I'm sure this story on Trump bankrupting farmers is completely unrelated. I certainly have no evidence it's related. But I think it's concerning (farmers refusing to sell large tracts of America is what held up the "California Forever" project).
You Aren't Allowed in These Billionaire Towns
what i hear from locals (mom moved there) is he wanted to buy the dump outside town on which to build his little billionaireburg.
This was all a calculated strategy to make independent farmers go bankrupt and into foreclosure, so that the big agritech companies could snag prime agricultural land for pennies on the dollar.
At some point, most food will be grown by corporations that can set whatever price they want for that food, and people will have to pay that price or starve to death. It’s the definition of “captured audience” that makes the Parasite Class extract so much wealth from the working class and become so fantastically wealthy.
Has this not already happened? The mythos of the independent farmer has existed since the great depression. I'm not convinced independent farmers actually exist anymore. Farmers are serfs who buy their seeds and their herbicides/fertilizers from Monsanto, and their tractors from John Deere. They lease the land from generational trusts and wall-street speculators.
Why would a corporation want to assume the risk of actually producing anything?
It's been happening steadily for a while, Trump just opened up a lot of avenues to accelerate it. There are still a lot of small and medium family farms that own their land and equipment.
I sincerely doubt it was calculated. This regime can’t think past its next Big Mac. The toddler in chief is far too reactionary to actually have a strategy beyond tomorrow’s unconstitutional removal of a public figure speaking out against republicans. It is highly convenient and will be taken advantage of by Big Ag to the fullest - and expect there to be clear favorites among Agribusiness just like when the media bent a knee to Trump and showered him with money.
The regime struggles to operate coherently, but certain elements of the regime are certainly capable of this sort of thing.
For instance, Vance has invested in the "AcreTrader" app, which is designed to take advantage of exactly this situation.
They’re stupid in every way except to grift to enrich themselves for the short term.
This has absolutely been planned, JD Vance is invested in AcreTrader and what's a better way to buy thousand's of acres for pennies on the dollar than to bankrupt farmers? And at the end of the day, I really don't think they deserve a bailout.
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
You play the martyr on the Fox TV
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Tariffs for nothin, no more sales for me
See the little fascist with the hairplugs and the make up Yeah, buddy, not his own hair That little fascist got his own jet airplane That little fascist, he's a millionaire
We gotta install a puppet president
Custom court judiciary
We got to move these
Republicans
We gotta move these
Color parties
Now that ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya, them guys are dumb
Get a MAGA tattoo on your little finger
Wear a MAGA diaper on your bum
They will get bailed out.
The people who vote Republican, and vote trump. They scream and screech about government spending. They complain about helping people with food stamps, free school lunches for kids. They reject Medicare for all and relieving college tuition debts. They vote to give tax decreases to billionaires who have 500 million dollar yachts, multiple hundred millions dollar mansions that sit empty, Lamborghinis that just sit there and never get driven.
They'll get bailed out with tax dollars. And they'll continue being hypocrites until they die.
They're not against government benefits. They just believe that 90% of the recipients are lying, lazy, liberal commie, transgender, urban criminal freeloaders who just don't want to work. If we could just get rid of all the abusers then the programs would have enough money to pay to the people who really deserve and need it (ie themselves).
They've already been bailed out. To the tune of $42B so far this year.
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/disaster-assistance-fuels-2025s-farm-income-rebound?_hsmi=379596581
That's the first step. The next step will be blaming the farmers for not fixing their problem, in whatever nebulous fashion they should have.
When it's the farmer's fault, no more bailouts. That's when AcreTrader will show up.
"That's socialism!!" /s
Biggest welfare queens in the world.
Every accusation is a confession from conservatives.
No way of knowing this would happen says people who were told repeatedly what would happen, shown the plan of what would happen, and given past historical examples of what would happen.
Oh noes! Reich Wingers getting exactly what they demanded, and feeling the consequences of it!
They wanted money for nothing
And their chicks for free.
Perpetual Mo
tionney MachineWell, at least they don't have to worry about "liberals" inflicting horrible thoughts on them via Colbert or Kimmel.
Are they tired of all the winning yet?
According to the bots in r/Conservative, they are not.
Wisdom is chasing them, but they are faster.
Because conservative ideology requires an other to rally hate against so the base and core voters don't realize its the elites and party leaders adding suffering to common folk lives for the elites short term benefit.
You got exactly what you voted for you jackasses.
Go protest, cause I'd love the farmers to be antifa.
They might even already have pitchforks
A really good piece on the realities of this topic is here: https://youtu.be/badGHJLDpP8
TL;DW: Farmers thought they were voting for cheap labor and a bailout, like they got last time. They also thought that, as wealthy landowners^1^, they were on the "right side" of these disastrous trade policies and were going to be carried through this mess.
^1.^ I struggled with this concept at first. Things have changed a lot since the pre-WWII era that conjures up images of Ma & Pa Kent in a weathered century-home, on a lonely corn farm in Kansas. It's big business now. Good farm land isn't cheap, equipment is expensive, (legitimate) labor is expensive, fertilizer & irrigation costs a lot, pest control costs, crops are risky in general, and so on. When you work out how much money is moving around and what a farm's net worth is, these people are millionaires even if they're not in the black all the time.
What’s really funny to people outside of the US is that cheap labour and a bailout is exactly what they would hve received from Harris.
Agreed. Considering that the alternative to that is always higher food prices, it's political suicide to not do this.
Unless you are planning on not having elections.
Complains that Americans are too lazy to milk cows and doesn't realize they are part of that group. Doubt they will learn anything.
Durrrrrr I'm gonna crack down on immigrant farm labor while I add lots of tariffs to foreign food durrrrrrrrrr
Fuckers trying to make America North Korea again
theres this farmer youtuber who was talking about this. She is like everyones like we never thought he would do this and she is like. You 100% knew he would do this from both his first term and everything he said before winning election.
Tbf, no, everyone criticized the "adults in the room" the first time around, myself included, for not doing anything constructive. We were wrong.
It's not wrong to demand accountability and action from leaders. Part of America's problem is that we don't do that enough.it's been since Obama's first election in 08 since the Democrats have had an open, untainted primary and we've still seen no major shakeups or changes to the leadership, just business as usual. The problem is that we're stuck in a system with only two real choices and there's no real solid way for the average voter to hold the leadership accountable. It's vote for our guy or the guy who's followers are throwing Nazi salutes wins.
We need to focus less on the presidential election and senators. We need to actually have some way of affecting government outside of election years. To my mind the first steps are state level elections and the house. We need to support third party candidates at the local and state level and we need to support things like the interstate compact that would have states cast their electorial votes for whoever wins the national popular vote. We need to focus on changing the electorial system so that proportional representation is used in the house and at the state level and make gerrymandering much more difficult. We need to change to a voting system like STAR which makes the election result better reflect the true will of the voters.
2020 was an open primary and Im tired of the bullshit saying it wasn't. Bernie lost.
Signed, a Bernie voter.
I fully agree! I just meant we were wrong about them not doing anything to check his worst impulses, but I was about as clear as mud in my conveyance.
Additionally, we have to factor in the sleeper agents, intended and not, bribes, threats, and other sorts of coercion. At the end of the day, everything is a huge risk and calculated gamble, but risks can be mitigated and gambles calculated, but we need to take our time and plan well, lest the losses be greater. In retrospect, that the US colonies of England won their revolution was a freaking miracle, paid for with a lot of personal and collective sacrifice. And heart. And that's the way it's always going to be, if any people collectively or indivually, is ever going to throw off the yoke of their oppressors.
are the farmers in dire straits, or are independent farmers in dire straights?
i make the distinction because if the purpose is to make the rich, richer, then this is a feature, not a bug for republicans
Yeah it's just the independent farmers. Here in Arkansas they're either losing their farms or straight up killing themselves, at a brisk pace too.
Happens here too. And who scoops up the land when it gets liquidated? JD goddamn Vance and his vultures.
All part of the plan :(
People like to use the example of Crassus' fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.
Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They're in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It's a problem for them, too.
Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they're in the same boat.
The goal is the collapse and consolidation of farms for private equity. JD is being loud about supporting one venture group buying up farms but it wouldn't surprise me if that was a proxy group and the one he is parading is supposed to take on liabilities and shed its assets, typical venture cap behavior.
I have more sympathy for my toenail clippings than I do for Trump voters getting exactly what they voted for.
But at least the leopards are still well-fed
Modern day leopard farmers canNOT understand why grain and soybean farmers forgot where their bootstraps are.
I guess they have very short memories
Dont worry. Hard working people from blue states will bail them out. Again
Maybe don't be a fucking moron and vote for a fucking moron then???
I hope leopards run wild in this country. Maybe a brain cell will rub against another braincell and spark a fucking thought in their tiny little skulls.
"fuckin whoops"
But they'll continue to vote Republican.
Oh also a Democrat farmer's perspective on this white debacle of Republican proportions.
https://youtu.be/badGHJLDpP8
Thanks for the link!
lmaoooooo fuck ‘em they shouldn’t have been that fucking stupid and greedy.
Force the farmers to pay back the bailouts back. Hypocrisy needs to carry severe monetary punishments
Fear not farmers Bill Gates will buy that land off you and you can finally Make America Gates Again.
Or more likely JD Vance himself. He was (is?) invested in AcreTrader, they takeover farm land and turn ownership into share-based investment vehicles.
Better than Make America Gaetz Again. All that young soil 🥵
Don't worry! Trump will hand them $12 billion like he did last time.
"One for you, three for me, one for you, three for me..."
We're well on our way towards famine.
Well, you folks are just speed running the apocalypse, aren't you.
Pestilence, War and now potentially Famine.
Might as well get it over with.
I think it’s more of the old republic Roman issue, the small farmers are being eaten up by giant corporate mega farms. Food production will continue but as a monopoly, where they can charge you $100 for a head of lettuce if they feel like it.
At what point do the eight different megacorps who each want half of my money go to war with each other when I can't actually buy their product anymore and just die?
After their private armies nuke each other, maybe we can plant some Mutfruit and raise some Brahmin on the irradiated soil that’s left behind
No, you're not. The average US consumer, even those who are desperately poor, still has significantly more buying power than the vast majority of the planet. A collapse in American agriculture will just mean a vast upswing in food imports, because for most of the world it will always be more profitable to sell that food to a US grocery chain than it will be to sell it locally. This will increase costs for US consumers, and push more Americans into poverty, but it won't cause a famine in the USA.
What you are well on your way towards is causing famines across vast portions of the world that aren't you. Famines that Americans will barely even notice, much less care about.
Yeah poor people can just make more money to buy the more expensive food, it's genius
Show me in my previous comment where I said that.
My point was not "Americans will be OK." I explicitly said that a collapse of American agriculture would push many more Americans into poverty.
But poverty is not famine. As awful as poverty is, famine is actually, somehow, worse. Poverty kills people, and in the scenario imagined it would kill many more people, but the absolute worst impacts would still be felt in places much further afield. America's failure would create destructive ripple effects across the world.
I think they are saying that our poor people already have "more money," at least relative to others who might get that food.
And the bug you describe is also a feature if you're the greedy fucker at the top trying to take advantage of desperate people.
IDK, there are already a lot of people hanging on by a thread in the US. A collapse in domestic production that leads to higher prices will push more people under the "secure" line. I think it'll also cause food shortages worldwide but I think you're overestimating how many Americans will be insulated.
Yes, I believe I covered that when I said "and push more Americans into poverty".
I'm not ignoring the plight of those people for whom starvation would be a very real threat in this scenario. But that's not the same thing as famine, and thinking that it is reflects a uniquely American level of isolation from the realities of the world. Poverty is terrifying - I've experienced it myself - but it is an entirely different order of magnitude from famine.
I know people who've experienced famine. I know people who've told me stories about taking a shit, and then immediately scooping it up and eating it just to sate the desparate, unbearable need to have some kind of food in their stomach. That's the level of insanity famine drives you to. It's a scale of hunger you and I can't even comprehend.
Nowhere in my previous comment did I say "It will be OK if American agriculture collapses." It would be awful. Many people would die, many more would suffer. But the absolute worst of that suffering wouldn't happen in the US, it would happen in other parts of the world that most Americans can't even name.
I don't know what the odds are on the US or a part of the US reaching the technical definition of famine, I'm just saying I wouldn't put it in the "definitely not happening" category. And it wouldn't be because there's not enough food available, more like the government is actively aggravating domestic food production and international trade and they're bumbling morons, which is a combination that could easily get us into shortages where a large chunk of the population is starving. And depending on which Americans it affects (or affects the most), the government may not care. Not saying it's definitely going to happen, but I think it's naive to say it definitely won't just based on America's buying power.
FWIW I agree that the current situation, whatever it's impact on America's food security, will impact other parts of the world more severely. I'm sure America's shit will still roll downhill.
They wont get any sympathy from me. They voted for it and they got what was coming to them.
Thoughts and prayers.
This is no mistake. The general plot is to create a situation where land can be purchased all across the US at low cost. Then the land will be owned by the wealthy for data centres and corporate owned and governed cities, states and mini nations (e.g. the breaking up of US into smaller corporate nations).
This already happened. Like 70+ years ago.
Started happening. There's still plenty of consolidation left to go. Hence the current pressure.
Well the Trump cronies are investing in their failure. I’m sure there will be ample debt based sharecropping opportunities working for the shareholders like Vance and theil in their future.
Oh well. Vote better next time, assclowns.
Insert Nelson meme, "haha!""
Sad trombone.
Oopsie poopsie
Its no use saying that you dont know nothin. They're still gonna getcha if you dont do something. Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest, oh yes. Once upon a time in the west
I don't live in the USA, but I wanted to check.
Remind me, do areas that have more agriculture/farmland usually vote for the Democrats, or the Republicans?
I'm kidding, I know the answer.
Suck it farmer's. You voted for this, now enjoy the "freedoms" that you have been granted by your political party.
I'll buy tofu $1 per pound
https://youtu.be/dkAxuqrVNBM
What about the last time he was president?