Dale Daniels, 74, has been involved in farming since he was old enough to walk.
Sunday afternoon, we stopped to visit alongside a recently terraced field with weeds burned brown by herbicide. Daniels bemoaned the woes facing today’s farmers.
Among concerns for his fields south of Humboldt are lack of rain, having been missed by spotty showers the past several days. Soybeans are just peeking through, corn isn’t growing like it should — leaves curling on hot afternoons from lack of moisture — and what little wheat that was planted this year conversely was hurt by too much rain early.
Those emerging calamities are bad enough, but there also are prices that will require bumper crops to turn much of a profit — another year in a series with prospects not encouraging.
Most farmers hereabouts have lived through hard times and learned long ago to look at income over a period of years, not with the annual immediacy of other businesses. Farm enterprises also have grown large enough — small farmer is an archaic term — that operators know full well to put away generous profits in a good year to tide them over when yields or prices or both turn sour.
At the moment in our area, prices are hovering on the low sides — $3.25 for corn, $8.50 for soybeans and $3.40 for wheat. Those are less than what buyers paid years ago, and costs associated with production — from seed and fertilizer, fuel and machinery to land costs and taxes, not to mention cost of living — have steadily climbed, with no recess.
All that may sound dire, but farmers are resilient, and do what they do because of their love of the land and dedication. Independence is a comforting feature, and merely watching a seed turn into a six-foot-tall corn stalk with a robust ear, maybe two, generates satisfaction that’s hard for a non-farmer to understand.
FOR YEARS, those making decisions in Washington, D.C. that affect farming have generally understood agriculture is a huge component of the nation’s economy.
The Farm Bureau likes to crow about one farmer feeding 150 of his friends and neighbors and also producing billions of bushels of grain and megatons of meat that help balance international trade.
Now comes President Trump, who doesn’t know a cutworm from a stick-tight, with proposals to cut crop insurance and other programs that give farmers some assurance they won’t go broke in a year or two of weather-related or financial reverses.
How important is agriculture to the U.S. economy? Between on-farm and support industries and businesses, agriculture makes up 11 percent of the nation’s employment — about 21 million jobs — and contributes $1 trillion a year to the economy.
That comes in two phases. Individually, it’s important beyond the wildest guess of many people — including Trump — to the wellbeing of rural communities and states; collectively, it’s at the forefront of ensuring the U.S. competes successfully in the global market.
The silver lining to Trump’s ag proposals is that Congress tends to favor agriculture. Everyone eats each day, and except for a naive handful, know where food originates.
WE WONDER if some of the ill-conceived policies and programs Trump has championed will lead to voters in rural states such as Kansas to re-up their support if he seeks a second term.
His idea of making America Great Again (as if it weren’t already) has found less and less support as the particulars of his plans unfold.
We need a president for all the people, not just a chosen few at the top of the financial heap.
— Bob Johnson
