Donald Trump seems to be unaware that the United States is one of the handful of countries that feed the entire world. Our soybeans, corn, and wheat fill the tables of people across the world directly or indirectly.
Donald Trump’s Administration is proposing a tariff on agricultural products exported from the United States (called an export tariff). This seems to be meant to force farmers to sell into the United States instead of supplying the rest of the world. Presumably this is to ‘lower prices’. Nobody seems to have told the Trump Administration that even if they were successful in using export tariffs to force agricultural product to stay inside the United States, they would CRASH the market for agricultural goods, lowering the total value of products produced, and put endless numbers of farmers out of business. The inflation caused by this would be insane.
“To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!” – Donald Trump on Truth Social
Their idea just does not work. US markets are already satisfied with the agricultural product that can be made economically inside the United States. We already have all the wheat, corn, and soybeans you could want. The problem is that we do not have the climate, labor, or soil for things like avocados, various fruits, and coffee. Those things need to be imported and nothing the Trump Administration does can change that.
The farming community is enraged. They make jokes about avocados being grown in Michigan but underneath the jokes, farmers are filled with hatred of the current administration. The Trump Administration is singlehandedly destroying the agricultural markets of the United States. They’re breaking systems farmers rely on. Farmers don’t even know what to plant because the Trump Administration has waffled so much and proposed such harsh measures that farmers do not know what to do.
The current US system of farming programs hardly works for farmers and instead of making federal programs better, the Trump Administration is actively making things even worse. Farmers have been left behind for too long and now they’re being thrown in the trash.
Why plant corn when you have no idea who will buy it? How are you going to get decent yields when Canadian fertilizer is beyond expensive? Even if you plant vegetables to make up for the lost vegetable production from Mexico, who the heck is going to harvest it? How are you supposed to make any money planting fruit trees when they take 10 to 15 years to fully mature? Who is even going to harvest the fruit when they’re ready? The problems are endless and that is because the Trump Administration is interfering in systems it has no understanding of.
If the Trump Administration goes through with export tariffs and the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, farmers will be screwed and every single person in the United States is going to pay the price. Every single person.
Nobody is going to plant vegetables they can’t harvest regardless of the current price. You have to understand this. If a farmer cannot harvest, they cannot sell. Every single head of lettuce has to be cut by someone. Every single tomato snipped off. Every single carrot pulled up. And nobody is going to be around to do it. Not at scale. There won’t be enough labor to go around and consumers will be faced with $50 heads of lettuce.
Let’s not forget that the prime vegetable and fruit growing regions in the United States are already basically filled up. Adding more production is not as easy as throwing some seed on the ground and letting mother nature do the rest. Not all soil types can produce the long straight orange carrots you’re used to at the store. Not all soils can support lettuce or celery or onions. Not every climate accepts every vegetable type. Oh, and climate change? My god. Step by step even less land is okay to grow fruits and vegetables in. And don’t even get me started about water scarcity in the vegetable and fruit growing regions of the United States. To skip the details and put it simply, there isn’t enough water and climate and soil types matter.
Farming is not as easy as urbanites seem to think. Even experienced gardeners do not understand farming systems, farming costs, and farming logistics. Just because you grew something in your garden somewhere does not mean that plant can be grown at scale in that area. Gardens often have radically different soil than the naturally occurring soil of the area due to amendments, mulch, and compost. We do not currently live in a world where systematic soil modification is affordable so a natural soil’s characteristics end up being important to what can be produced.
And to reiterate, there already is not enough water for everyone.
And when it comes to meat, the United States produces about 20% of the world’s beef and chicken. The United States also produces about 11% of the world’s pork. All of this meat has to be processed and a lot of the time the person doing this processing is an immigrant. An immigrant that the Trump Administration plans to deport. So we’re not just talking about row crop farmers being hurt here, we’re talking about pig farmers and ranchers too.
Do you really think anyone in the Trump Administration understands any of this, considering their behavior towards farmers? I’m not sure I’d believe any of them have ever even gardened before. The United States exports a lot of agricultural products in general and having a tariff on exported product is just asinine.
You can’t grow an avocado in Michigan and nobody is going to be around to harvest our tomatoes. These are facts. And another fact is that export tariffs combined with external tariffs and the tariffs put upon US goods by countries in retaliation will destroy the agricultural markets of the United States and the Trump Administration couldn’t care less.