Missouri farms cannot withstand another round of Trump rates

When a sports team cannot seem to “finish”, the coach often has the team to return to the fundamental elements. The goals of the initial invoice of the farm were three times:

1. Maintain the prices of farm and food for farmers and consumers.

2. Ensure -adequate food supply.

3. Protect and support the vital natural resources of the country.

Now, with the discussions about the tariffs from the Trump administration and the concerns that the already low prices of the farm will continue to sink, one thing is clear: to achieve all three objectives of the initial law of the farm, especially the first, we must restore the offer management. One of the primary instruments of the initial invoice of the farm was the objective of giving family farmers a correct price – income that covers the cost of production and, ideally, a habitable salary. Family farmers request the management of the offer for decades.

Rates are taxes on import and export of goods between countries. From a historical point of view, American tariffs for imports have led to reprisals from other countries that then put tariffs for our exports, lowering the amount of goods they buy from US farmers, increasing the US offer and lowering prices for US farmers. During the first Trump administration, countries responded against American tariffs by targeting US farming exports. When exports slowed down, prices paid to submerged farmers, costing US taxpayers to compensate for low prices.

The objective of the agricultural policy of managing the offer is to adjust the agricultural production to reduce the supply of agricultural goods and the negative impact that results in market prices and agricultural income, also preventing price tips affecting consumers.

Offer management includes a price floor, price ceilings, USA loans for US agriculture and cereal reserves held by farmers. The offer management would save billions of billions of dollars by eliminating the need for a series of emergency payments needed to keep the farmers on the surface in the face of the volatility of prices from the year.

The last vestige to manage the supply for the big American goods was in the 1985 law. In the 1996 version of the bill, the Congress concluded what remained of the supply management programs, including the usual practice of maintaining a reserve of stored goods. The bill of the 1996 farm law was called “Freedom Freedom”, but outside Washington, it was quickly renamed “the freedom to fail.”

In our recent past, we have noticed volatile changes in the price of goods such as corn, soy and wheat. Our current system of invoices for “safety nets”, based on the subsidized culture insurance of taxpayers, was born in the 2014 agricultural invoice, written after the farmers enjoyed significant increases in the farm, which reached the maximum in 2013.

From 2014 to 2016, I saw that the income from the farm has decreased due to the decrease of the prices of the goods caused by overproduction and the increase of the input costs (which costs the growth of a culture). During the first Trump administration, from 2017 to 2019, agricultural revenues continued.

And, at this moment, farmers are facing a similar scenario: the record income from 2020 to 2022, 2022 reaching a maximum level of $ 182 billion. However, due to the increased cost of production, agricultural revenues for 2023 decreased by 19.5%, and overproduction caused the prices of goods to decrease by 4.4% in 2024.

Our current safety net is inappropriate to solve these problems, and the agriculture census in the United States. From 2012 to 2022, the US lost 208,816 farms and 181,123 cattle operations.

History continues to repeat itself and continue to lose more farmers. Therefore, instead of doing the same thing and expecting a different result, President Donald Trump and Congress must create a real net safety to help stabilize prices – entry prices paid by farmers, prices paid to farmers for their crops and the prices paid for food.

The Kansas Senator, Jerry Moran, recognizes this, saying: “We need a draft law in force, even if it is the current, but the current is insufficient to meet the needs of the disaster that happens in the income of farmers from all over the country.”

The current market market price is about $ 4.50, and the cost of production for that bushel is about $ 5.67. Farmers lose more than 1 dollar on Bushel. It is the same story on soy, while the current price of the market is about $ 9.90, while the production cost is $ 12.72 – a loss of nearly $ 3 per bushel.

The current safety networks of agricultural invoices are a farce that has taken off the business farmers and led to the loss of thousands of farms. Rates without a strategy such as managing supply will make agricultural income decrease. We lost 141,733 farms from 2017 to 2022. How many can we afford to lose by doing the same and waiting for a different result?