Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Southampton County Farm Bureau President Gary Cross expressed an understanding of what U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to achieve with his deployment of tariffs, but Cross indicated that they will lead to significant near-term challenges for area farmers.

IMPACTS OF TARIFFS

“If I had to address tariffs, I would have to say — and I think most of agriculture would agree — that a lot of stuff that President Trump is doing with his programs and tariffs is to get us on an equal playing field,” Cross said.

He noted that the unequal playing field for the United States holds true for a variety of products, including automobiles, steel, aluminum and fuel, along with agricultural products.

“We tend to catch the short end of the stick with our products getting shipped out of here, yet they’re getting sent back with higher tariffs on them,” he said.

Then he listed an example to illustrate this issue.

“So if we send out raw cotton to Vietnam and they make T-shirts and send them back, it seems like the tariffs (paid by Vietnam) for the T-shirts coming back aren’t as high as (those paid by the U.S. for) the cotton leaving the country,” he said.

Highlighting soybeans, wheat and corn, Cross said, “We greatly rely on trade with other countries to absorb these products that we produce. We produce way more in this country than we need to survive if we were just singing our own song and not paying attention to anybody else. We wouldn’t need a third of the farmers that we have if we weren’t trying to feed the rest of the world. There are countries out there that can’t feed themselves. They don’t have the technologies, they don’t have the land, the infrastructure, so they rely heavily on what we’re able to help them (with).”

He indicated that the situation with the tariffs is a wait-and-see one.

“We know that near-term, we are going to take some bad hits that we really can’t afford to take right now, and we don’t know how long this situation is going to continue,” he said.

THE NEED FOR A FARM BILL

He highlighted another difficult development for farmers.

“Talks of a farm bill are falling further and further behind, and more people are saying we’re not going to have one than saying we are going to have one, which a new farm bill hopefully would be structured to help protect us in these times of poor trade and poor prices and high inputs,” he said. “But we’re a long ways from a farm bill from what I’m hearing in my monthly meetings in Richmond, as well as (from) those representatives we have going to Washington every day.”

Cross also serves as a state director for the Virginia Farm Bureau.

He noted that farm bills are created at the federal level, and 2018 was the last time a farm bill was written. He said farm bills are supposed to be five- to six-year bills.

“So we’re already into the second year of no farm bill, and nothing has been updated, prices,” he said. “Our inputs have increased drastically in six years, so we desperately need a farm bill out of Washington that’ll give us some support.

“And now to put these tariffs on top of us, it’s not good,” he continued. “We’d like to stay the course as long as we can, but we’re coming off of a year of poor commodity prices and high inputs. Even though we had good crops, peanuts and cotton both, we got very little for them.”

“We’re coming off of a year of low income, now we’re going to be faced with no support from a farm bill and possible tariffs if they stay in place where we can’t trade with China and a few other countries,” he added.

Trump has also deployed tariffs in connection with Canada.

“We get most all of our potash for our crops from Canada, and I haven’t heard what’s going to happen with that, but that could be very detrimental to our growing the kind of crop that we need to grow with no potash or not an ample supply of potash, because that’s a very much used product,” Cross said.

Oxford Languages notes that potash is “an alkaline potassium compound, especially potassium carbonate or hydroxide.”

Cross said, “We have great potash supplies here in our own country, but they’re not mined.”

He indicated that trouble gaining permits for mining the potash supplies has been an issue.

USDA SPENDING FREEZES

Reuters has reported that the Trump Administration has placed a freeze on some U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grants and loans as it conducts a broad review of federal spending.

While this could have local impacts for organizations like food banks, Cross did not expect much impact on the Farm Bureau.

“I’m not really sure that’s going to impact us at all,” he said. “The employees like at our (Farm Service Agency) FSA offices, best I heard recently, fall under a different classing of employees that are not in any cuts like you’ve seen in other departments. So that’s good for us in that the local FSA offices are not impacted.

“Having said that, there’s still a hiring freeze, and as people retire, which they are doing, those jobs will be left open for a while, evidently, until the hiring freeze goes away,” he added.

He explained that the Farm Bureau is not in any shape, form or fashion a government organization.

“So nothing like that affects Farm Bureau employees or the service that we provide,” he said. “But speaking for agriculture, speaking for farmers, what I said was accurate that our FSA offices are our local support system for farmers from Washington down. So having said what I said, that still holds true that it’s good that the ladies working in that FSA office won’t be directly impacted except for those that are retiring and not filling positions.

“But for Farm Bureau, like I say, we wag our own tail,” he added. “Washington is not going to interfere with our insurance businesses or our lobbying efforts or anything else.”