Republicans are hurting Iowa’s farmers and economy

Tim Gannon | Iowa View contributor

My dad owned a John Deere dealership during the Farm Crisis, and I learned early on that if farmers weren’t buying tractors, implement dealers weren’t selling tractors, and the folks who work in our state’s John Deere and Case factories weren’t building tractors.

My fear is our state will see this scenario play out again if our Republican leaders keep us on the path we’re going.

Iowa can’t afford the same kind of triple whammy on the economy we saw in the 1980s. The last thing we need is federal policy that causes hardship in the countryside, leading to farmers going out of business, consolidation of farms, and further population loss in our rural counties.

This spring, farmers hoped for warmer temperatures and a break in the snow and rain so they could get their corn and beans in the field, and they hoped for cooler rhetoric in Washington so that the price they’d receive for this year’s crop would help them get through to 2019. The weather cooperated enough for most farmers to get their work done, but there has been no relief from Republicans on trade. Gov. Kim Reynolds and other Republican officials claim to have the ear of President Trump, but they haven’t had any success in making him understand the serious situation facing Iowa farmers and the communities and businesses that depend on a healthy agricultural economy.

The uncertainty on trade created by Republicans in D.C. has driven prices for soybeans down more than $1.50/bushel, corn down more than 50 cents/bushel, and pork producers are out about $18 for every pig they raise this year, leading economists at Iowa State to predict that Iowa farmers could lose nearly $1 billion. Farm income has declined in recent years and before prices fell due to President Trump’s tariffs, USDA was already predicting farmers to see their lowest income since 2006.

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue recently wrote that Trump would protect Iowa farmers from Chinese retaliation. If the president had considered his actions more carefully, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. If he’d built a coalition of countries unhappy with China’s trading practices we might already be bringing the weight of the world to bear on China. Instead he drove our allies to impose their own retaliatory tariffs on us. This has stalled NAFTA renegotiations, and made the future uncertain for dairy farmers.

The signals this administration has been sending do not give farmers great confidence. No two members of the administration have said the same thing two days in a row. One day the trade war is off, two days later it is back on, and the income our farmers will get come harvest falls a little bit more. Secretary Perdue also said that USDA will have a program to help farmers negatively impacted by falling prices in a trade war. No farm group or farm state member of Congress has asked for a new program. Farmers want to sell their product to willing customers.

It is worth nothing that in its first budget proposal, the Trump Administration called for eliminating all USDA funding for export promotion. I helped lead USDA’s agency that oversees the federal crop insurance program, so I know about the importance of the farm safety net in protecting producers from natural disasters like floods, droughts and untimely frosts. But all of those are natural disasters. This trade war is a man-made disaster.

The trade situation reminds us that just as we shouldn’t depend solely on exports of our corn, beans, pork, eggs, beef, dairy products and ethanol to keep our state’s economy strong. We should seek to sell our high-quality products around the world. But we should also push for investments in public research so that we can find new uses for what we grow, or figure out new products that we can grow and process in small towns all across this state. By diversifying the uses of our commodities we not only better manage the risk of a country deciding to stop buying our crops but we also can create jobs and wealth in places that need new industries. Farmers led the way in developing the ethanol and biodiesel industries, and we can do it again.

Tim Gannon farms with his dad and cousin outside Mingo. He worked at USDA for eight years and is the Democratic candidate for Iowa's Secretary of Agriculture.