The Midwest has been subject to widespread flooding that has destroyed homes and businesses across four states. Those floods have also put a lot of farmland underwater. They’ve done so at a time of year when farmers were either just planting, or just preparing to plant, crops in millions of currently deluged acres. Farmers are already on the brink. They’re suffering from Trump’s trade war that has caused commodity prices to crash as it has driven former U.S. partners to buy grain elsewhere. They’re suffering from deregulation that makes it easier for banks to foreclose. And they’re suffering from a government that is intentionally ignoring climate change in planning for disasters.
It’s not just fields that are flooded. Because Trump’s tariffs and trade wars have driven prices to record lows, many farmers had put unsold grain from last year in storage, hoping against hope that demand might rise enough to allow them to sell later. But those silos and bins are also underwater, ruining millions of pounds of grain. With losses already huge, and predictions that things are going to continue to get worse through the spring, the U.S. government is preparing to do … nothing.
As Reuters reports, Agriculture Undersecretary Bill Northey took a helicopter ride to see flooded fields, some of which are likely lost for the year, and admitted that there is “no mechanism to compensate farmers for damaged crops in storage.” Just as NOAA has described the floods as “epic,” “unprecedented,” and “historic,” the Agriculture Department admits that the loss of grain in storage is “a problem never before seen on this scale.”
That problem comes not just because Trump’s trade war caused farmers to store record amounts of grain, but because climate change has increased the number and severity of extreme weather events. Trump took an industry already subject to the vagaries of annual changes in temperature and rainfall and positioned it so that any extreme weather event would be a disaster.
Now it is a disaster. And despite paying farmers more than $12 billion in compensation for the damage done by Trump’s trade wars, it’s just a drop in the bucket. Farms were failing at a rate not seen in four decades before the flooding began. For farmers holding on in hopes of one good year … this is not it.
The $12 billion that the USDA made available to farmers who suffered trade-war losses wasn’t enough to slow the rate of failing farms. However, it was $12 billion taken directly from other programs to fund Donald Trump’s tariff obsession. Trump loves to talk about the billions the U.S. is “making” from tariffs, without mentioning that those costs go straight to American consumers. He’s less eager to talk about the billions he’s paying out simply in an effort to patch over the disaster his tariffs have created.
While the USDA has coughed up billions in the hope of keeping struggling farmers on team Trump, the agency doesn’t have a program to compensate farmers for the grain lost in storage. It does have funds for helping farmers whose fields will be out for the season, or whose acreage was damaged in the flooding, but those programs have not been increased to consider the scale of the damage as climate change increases the number of severe weather events.
Congress may move to make more funds available to compensate farmers for lost crops, but no bill has yet been introduced. No matter what happens, America is out billions for Donald Trump’s trade war, and billions more for failing to plan for climate change.
