Anxious Farmers Search for Rainbow Amid Floods and Trade War

The Midwest was inundated by flooding this past spring, keeping farmers from planting crops that they might not be able to sell this fall anyway because of tariffs.

By ART CULLEN

Aaron Heley Lehman listened to the rain tap his window pane in the machine shed for two weeks, wondering when he would ever finish planting corn on his central Iowa farm, and watched the markets tank as President Trump blustered on in his trade war with China.

Five inches of rain fell. Just one day in two weeks without rain. Another week’s worth might be on the way. And soybeans are down $2.50 per bushel since the farmer’s friend in the red MAGA cap assumed the presidency, at least a buck-per-bushel below break-even for most operators.

“It’s been a miserable spring,” Lehman said.

Iowa farmers have been losing money five or six years straight. Climate change is making wilder weather the new normal in the Tall Corn State. Spring floods from heavy rains melting polar-vortex snow mountains upstream burst the levees of the Mighty Mississippi so you could float a boat through downtown Davenport. On Iowa’s West Coast, the Muddy Missouri got muddier when it raged through the Loess Hills and valleys and took entire towns with it — Pacific Junction, pop. 470, and Hamburg, pop. 1,187. Tens of thousands of acres have been scoured, perhaps never to be probed by a corn planter again.

The politicians have toured and put their fingers to the wind. Iowa is vital electorally. It was key to Trump’s victory, as was Wisconsin, similarly inundated by trade wars and oceans of corporate milk drowning independent dairy farmers.

They went back to DC and answered with a $19 billion weather disaster aid package, with $3.3 billion for the Midwest. But a lone Republican congressman from Texas named Chip Roy was able to hold it up, all by himself, over border-wall funding until Congress returns from a hard-earned Memorial Day vacation. (The bill later passed when everyone got back to town.) Meanwhile, farm suicide rates are at their highest levels since the Midwest depression of the mid-1980s. Lehman says some people he knows have thought about it.

Since Trump wiped out our soybean market — three-quarters of Iowa’s beans were bound for China — he threw farmers and livestock producers $12 billion in trade disaster aid. Farmers call it the “Trump bump.” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced another bump in May: $16 billion to be targeted at the farm counties’ worst hit by losses in soy and pork trade. Nobody out here knows how much it will be or who gets paid. What they do know is that to get any of this next Trump Bump you must plant a crop this year, come Hell or high water.

Every farmer is champing to get after it. About a third of the corn crop in my northwest Iowa county, Buena Vista, remained to be planted by early June. It should have been done weeks ago. The soybeans are behind the corn. The sloughs of old have reappeared and overwhelmed our best drainage engineering. Yet a key crop insurance deadline passed on May 31. After that you start to lose coverage incrementally if you plant corn after that. Decisions had to be made: Leave that field fallow even after you invested fertilizer and herbicide in it?

Who knows how all the government programs will work?

So you just plow ahead.

You plant.

“A lot of people will just be mudding it in for the trade aid rather than for the market,” said Iowa State University Extension markets economist Chad Hart. He said it will take weeks for rules to dribble out and months for payments to arrive. Don’t plant or not plant based on rumors, he advises. He worries.

“Confusion reigns, and that is the last thing a farmer needs right now,” Hart said. “This has been the most confusing planting season I have ever seen.”

Bankers are trying to figure it all out, too. They’re watching farm working capital erode every year. Government bailouts can’t keep everyone whole. If you own the land you are treading water to making a little bit. If you are renting?

“It’s damn tough making it farming,” said Citizens First National Bank Vice President Dave Drey, who also farms with his brother Dennis near Storm Lake.

He, too, is groping for information to help his customers as world events and torrents of water whipsaw markets. He knows that government bailouts inevitably leave some farmers out, that they can be regionally targeted politically, that they distort rational decision-making, and that everyone would rather get their supper from the market and not the soup line.

That’s what all the politicians mouth: trade over aid. Sen. Chuck Grassley is chipping his teeth clucking on tariffs. Yet Republicans try to defend Trump in a state that is among the most export-sensitive in the nation. Sen. Joni Ernst told Storm Lakers one recent rainy May day that farmers are willing to take the short-term pain for the long-term gain.

“It’s the easiest thing to tell yourself that, but that is not what they’re saying when they’re talking to the banker,” said Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union.

And then Trump threatens to hike tariffs on Mexico over immigration, further roiling markets and farmers’ guts. Republicans said they had enough, but Grassley insisted that he stands with the President four-square on immigration.

What gain? And how long the pain?

Lehman, 51, said a neighbor, in his 70s and farming with his son, popped by that morning idled by the weather. He was talking about markets and the rain. Not really about the future, how we could turn this all around and make ourselves right again. Everyone is stuck in the present muck.

“I’ve never seen him as down as he was this morning,” Lehman said. “People are just grumpy.”

Spring weather like this usually scares the Chicago Board of Trade pits into a rally. Not this year because of the trade war. Then there is an African virus sweeping China that has culled 40% of its swine herd, further reducing soybean demand. Perish the thought of the flu hitting Iowa, the hog capital of the world with tens of thousands of dependent jobs.

“It’s like everything is coming together all at once,” said Rich Robinson, a 74-year-old farmer near Storm Lake. “I really don’t know where we’re going to end up. Old farts like me can stand it for a little while, I guess. But not these younger guys.”

It casts a pall over the Midwest. Manufacturing profits are off because of rising steel costs. Line workers in Davenport feel it. Regional manufacturing towns are just hanging on. Most everybody in Iowa is one or two generations removed from the farm or the county seat town. They know. They spoke in the midterm elections by sending two new congresswomen to Washington.

Rural America has been in a squeeze the past 40 years. Presidential candidates are awake to it because rural people are confronting them with it: consolidation of the livestock industry (the largest pork producer in the United States, Smithfield Foods, is owned by the Chinese), seed and chemical companies bidding for every acre with crops genetically modified for the next poison, and an imploding export market manipulated for political ends. The candidates are responding with serious proposals around anti-trust enforcement and directing more conservation aid to battle climate change. They remain abstractions on the 2021 horizon.

Frustration is the word for here and now. It ripples everywhere.

Farmer Robinson recalls five decades of work by Iowans trying to build that Chinese market as an answer to our chronic problem of over-production. “Now it looks like it could have been all for naught,” he lamented.

And here we thought we had things under control when former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad was appointed ambassador to China. It could take years to restore those lost markets taken by Brazil and Argentina.

Those are some formidable clouds to part. We all hope that they do, as a few sprouts come up from those fields touched during a window of sunshine. Everyone still cheers for corn knee-high to an elephant’s eye by the Fourth of July.

Lehman just wants to plant the farm that’s been in his family for five generations. Grumpiness started to fade when the sun peeked through for the Memorial Day weekend, and a breeze picked up to dry out that black gummy soil.

“You find a way to work through it,” he said, greasing that tractor one more time, an anxious gear jockey waiting for the gate to swing wide.

A version of this column previously appeared in The Guardian (theguardian.com). Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa. His book, “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper,” was published by Viking Press in October.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2019


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