Trump's $12B Farm Bailout Doesn't Cover Soybean Farmers' Losses @WestmorelandPops

[00:00:00]Iowa, back into your Missouri.

[00:00:03]Um >> [cough] >> the farmers [clears throat] who had their predominantly the soybean farmers that had their Asian market taken away.

[00:00:13]How much have they rebounded with the with the bailout? How much have they rebounded with these talks that had that bore some fruit with China? And is China even close to living up to what they said they would do?

[00:00:27]>> Well, so a couple of things. Um first of all, if you talk to like I talked to some ag economists on a regular basis because if I'm going to come out and talk about the farming economy, I want to make sure you know that I'm talking to the best folks out there as Trump would say. We have some of our you know best people working on this. So I talked to these ag economists on a regular basis. The gap they think, the amount of money lost by farmers last year is somewhere between 28 billion and 41 billion, okay?

[00:00:59]>> Sure.

[00:01:00]>> So that's the amount of money that was lost because we lost these foreign markets, we lost margin, that kind of thing. So the president offered a 12 billion dollar bailout. Now you don't have to be really good at math to know that even if the number is 29 billion and we threw 12 billion at the problem, that's a big gap, right? That's a 15 billion dollar gap.

[00:01:22]And it's probably even bigger than that.

[00:01:24]So what that's caused Tom is you've got a huge number of farmers that are floating over from last year. A lot of debt and that's why bankruptcies went up 46% and that doesn't even include the number of farmers are sitting on their biggest wealth resource their land. So that 46% increase in bankruptcies, that doesn't even include the number of farmers that are just selling out because they're sitting on you know a million, two million, three, four million dollars worth of land um on top of that. So, that's one thing, okay?

[00:01:59]Uh, no. The president's quote-unquote $12 billion bailout that he was bragging about in Wisconsin, it doesn't come close to covering the loss cost from last year. The second thing is, you got to you got to remember, and if you're not in farming, people wouldn't know this, the deal we got with China, the outline of the deal, which was not a deal like most Trump deals, quote-unquote, >> Right.

[00:02:23]>> it locks us into a purchasing pattern on the part of the Chinese that's less than what we were annually selling under Biden with no giveaways, okay? So, in other words, just like with Iran, we're going to come out of this thing with a worse agreement than the one he canceled. We're going to come out of this China trip, if we do get the deal, it'll be worse than what we already had in place under Biden. We'll be selling less to the Chinese every year than we did when Biden was in office. There are two other things that really worry me.

[00:02:53]One is, the Chinese, in order to get this deal, which is worse than what we already had, uh, they got the administration to agree to two things. One is, we're going to put together this commission of trade, um, or investment, I mean, and the Chinese are going to probably be able to start buying American farmland again and invest in American tech companies, which our intelligence sources in this country have told us for decades is the wrong thing to do. Like, corporate espionage, and China's the number one perpetrator of corporate espionage. So, why don't we just go ahead and let them start investing in American companies? What could go wrong, right?

[00:03:32]Uh, and then the second thing is, there's this board of trade, which means, as crazy as it sounds, China gets to start telling us, or at least putting in their two cents about what items we can sell and they can buy.

[00:03:50]So, we've given up these two huge chips for an agreement that if it goes through will have us selling fewer agricultural products to them than we were under Biden without these concessions.

[00:04:03]>> And we don't have another outlet, do we?

[00:04:06]Because we have we have places like Brazil and other Central American countries that are chewing up those those international markets. So, our soybean farmers don't have an additional outlet for that 20 to 25% of the global consumption of soybeans.

[00:04:23]>> Yeah, and the the truth is just to put it a crass way is how you going to place one how you going to replace 1 billion Chinese bellies with I mean, you know, with 300 million Americans and and the truth of the matter is most corn and soybeans a lot of people don't know this, but most corn and soybeans that we go and grow in this country go into animal feed, fuel, and processed food. And we grow very little in the [clears throat] row crops that we actually eat that we physically eat. And that's got to change. We got to get back to farming products that people can eat, but we're not going to do that until we have an infrastructure style program that helps farmers convert over to those types of crops because it's just too expensive. I mean, you basically if you switch to organic or you switch to regenerative agriculture, you're looking at two to five years of no profits while you do that conversion. So, you know, FDR would have said, "Okay, we got to do the conversion. Let's treat it like infrastructure and let's keep farmers in business until they transfer over, you know?" But we just don't have that kind of forward thinking in this administration.