The Canadian prime minister earlier cautioned that imposing sweeping tariffs on Canadian products would only raise prices for Americans and hurt American businesses.
More importantly. Farmers can’t just stop planting Johnny-on-the-spot and they can’t hold their breath until day of. At some point, the United States is going to have a shit ton of food on hand. This is a very big problem when you have way too much food.
There’s a cost to growing food and loans are usually taken out to cover those costs, repaying them when the items are sold. But every American cannot just buy all the food that was going to be sold to foreign countries. Not all food can be repurposed and some of the food that will be repurposed for something like fuel or animal feed, all of those have dramatically decreased return on value. So having too much food massively depresses the price of the crop. Which means those loans taken out by farmers come a calling, causing farmers to default and lose their farms.
This is exactly what happened with the American Farm crisis of the 1980s. Many local agricultural banks collapsed, the Farm Credit System took some of the largest losses ever since the Great Depression, grocers began consolidating leading to the handful of grocers that we have today, the industrial farming industry moved in and took a strangle hold that the US is still dealing with, and land speculation in the wake of the massive foreclosures shot through the roof escalating urban sprawl. Having a surplus of food isn’t a bad thing, but having way too much food can be the thing that triggers a massive collapse in several economic industries that can have decades long effect.
Even the small rural town I live in used to have four FCS accredited banks, that employed nearly fifty people. All of those banks went defunct in the wake of the farming crisis. The farms out here have all but been completely changed from the independent growers that they used to be, to being contract farming industry owned/family operated. Where there used to be a thriving sorghum farm, it has all but changed into a Tyson contracted industrial chicken farm with long red barns as far as the eye can see.
More importantly. Farmers can’t just stop planting Johnny-on-the-spot and they can’t hold their breath until day of. At some point, the United States is going to have a shit ton of food on hand. This is a very big problem when you have way too much food.
There’s a cost to growing food and loans are usually taken out to cover those costs, repaying them when the items are sold. But every American cannot just buy all the food that was going to be sold to foreign countries. Not all food can be repurposed and some of the food that will be repurposed for something like fuel or animal feed, all of those have dramatically decreased return on value. So having too much food massively depresses the price of the crop. Which means those loans taken out by farmers come a calling, causing farmers to default and lose their farms.
This is exactly what happened with the American Farm crisis of the 1980s. Many local agricultural banks collapsed, the Farm Credit System took some of the largest losses ever since the Great Depression, grocers began consolidating leading to the handful of grocers that we have today, the industrial farming industry moved in and took a strangle hold that the US is still dealing with, and land speculation in the wake of the massive foreclosures shot through the roof escalating urban sprawl. Having a surplus of food isn’t a bad thing, but having way too much food can be the thing that triggers a massive collapse in several economic industries that can have decades long effect.
Even the small rural town I live in used to have four FCS accredited banks, that employed nearly fifty people. All of those banks went defunct in the wake of the farming crisis. The farms out here have all but been completely changed from the independent growers that they used to be, to being contract farming industry owned/family operated. Where there used to be a thriving sorghum farm, it has all but changed into a Tyson contracted industrial chicken farm with long red barns as far as the eye can see.