Farewell Famiy Farms

Farewell to the Family Farm
Trump Abandons Farmers

The Trump Administration just told Wisconsin’s family farmers to get bigger or go out of business. Wisconsin family dairy farmers, already facing steep competition from large corporate farm operations, are leaving their fields, selling their herds and going bankrupt in record numbers rather than grow themselves out of work. Wisconsin has lost over 1,000 dairy farms in the last two years.

On Monday, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue addressed the World Dairy Expo in Madison. He said family farm survival depended on their getting bigger in order to catch up with the large corporate operations. “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Purdue said. This not the first time Purdue has put small farmers down. He recently called farmers “a bunch of whiners” at Minnesota Farmfest.

In a press conference after the Expo, Jerry Volenec, a dairy farmer from Grant county said, “What I heard today from the secretary of agriculture was there’s no place for me.”

The Wisconsin Farmers Union strongly condemned Purdue’s remarks in a press release. WFU President and third-generation dairy farmer Darin Von Ruden runs a 50-cow organic dairy farm in Westby. He noted that the “bigger is better” mantra has not panned out well for rural Wisconsin in recent years. 

“The mindset that has been pushed on farmers to continually grow is ultimately pushing them out of business as overproduction forces market prices down,” Von Ruden said. 

Farm losses have accelerated in recent years, ripping farm communities apart. The loss of revenues in rural areas is reaching their Main Streets causing banks to close along with post offices and grocery stores, Von Ruden noted. 

At the press conference, Von Ruden said, “When there’s no money in the farming community it doesn’t stay in that farming community and so it disappears and the local community disappears.” “We need to look at something that will benefit all of our rural America, not just corporate rural America. 

Democratic Representative Ron Kind noted that the Trump administration’s Market Facilitation Program that was supposed to help struggling family farm operations has, instead, favored large corporate farms. Kind wrote to Purdue complaining that the top one percent of large farms received an average of $183,000 in trade aid while the bottom 80% received under $5,000. He also told Purdue that 82 large farms received more than $500,000 and 95 percent of all payments went to the top 50 percent of farms. 

The Market Facilitation Program was developed in response to the Trump trade war with China when China responded to Trump imposed tariffs with tariffs on American farm exports that hit small farms, including those in Wisconsin, especially hard. 

Rep. Kind’s letter to Purdue asked the Secretary to make sure that the next round of payments to farmers harmed by the trade war went to those actually harmed by it. Kind noted that $38 million of the last round of payments went to addresses in American cities indicating they were made to corporate farm owners and not family farmers. 

The facts are grim for farmers. “Between July 2018 and June 2019, the number of farms that filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy rose by 13 percent over the previous year,” according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. “Loan delinquency rates have reached a six-year high. And nearly 13,000 farms disappeared in 2018 according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” the Federation noted. 

Politico reports, “Farm exports in fiscal 2019 are down nearly 7 percent from 2018, exacerbating one of the toughest periods for agriculture since the 1980s farm crisis.”

Finally, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “The fallout continues as farmers, on the cusp of spring planting, decide whether to invest in seed, chemicals, fertilizer and other supplies needed to raise the crops they feed to their cattle. More than 300 Wisconsin dairy farms shut down between January and May, including 90 -three a day- in April alone.”

Family farms are the backbone of Wisconsin’s rural economy. If we continue to lose these farms and their surrounding communities to the corporate mega operations that sell cheap and take their profits home, some to foreign countries, and continue to invite retaliatory tariffs on farm exports in a needless trade war, we will all suffer