Courting farmers still crucial
Biden could find inroads among rural constituency after Trump’s approach
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump tenaciously courted farmers and ranchers with an anti-regulatory agenda and a confrontational trade approach that opened some markets.
But he also relied on billions in federal aid to compensate them for retaliatory tariffs and a pandemic that took a deep gouge out of the economy.
Despite the mixed performance, Trump’s policies on trade, regulation and other areas maintained his popularity in rural and farm communities, winning their support in the Nov. 3 election.
President-elect Joe Biden nevertheless has a chance to do what he didn’t manage as a candidate: make inroads by distinguishing his performance from Trump’s in ways that are important to a rural constituency. He could give robust government backing to biofuels, an area where Trump waffled. Biden could deliver some agriculture sales abroad, reversing setbacks that followed Trump’s trade wars and the economic slowdown from the pandemic.
More treacherous for Biden may be regulation, especially on the environment and climate change, issues that are important for his Democratic Party but also ones in which solutions could be disruptive to agriculture. Trump repealed the Obama administration’s 2015 regulation known as Waters of the United States, which expanded federal review of waters. The Obama rule sparked opposition from the American Farm Bureau Federation, which said it would allow the EPA to interfere with how farmers use their land.
Farmers and ranchers are waiting to see Biden’s regulatory agenda in the Agriculture Department, the EPA and the Interior Department.
Trump enjoyed a close relationship with farmers. He spoke to thousands of cheering members of the Farm Bureau at the organization’s annual January convention in 2018, 2019 and 2020. That helped Trump get praise and support for coming to agriculture’s aid even when his policies created the need for the aid.
“President-elect Biden will set himself up well if he takes a chapter out of that playbook of giving attention to farmers while also creating a steady hand to bring some stability back to the markets, bringing some clarity of direction on climate change and farmers’ role in that,” National Farmers
Union president Rob Larew said.
After a boom year in 2013, key segments of agriculture had endured several years of low or flat market prices by the time Trump entered the White House. What followed was a new North American trade pact that widened the market for U.S. products, but also trade wars that brought retaliatory duties from trading partners. And in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic hit, temporarily closing slaughterhouses and forcing producers to euthanize their animals.
But infusions of federal funds steadied farm incomes. The Trump administration made $23 billion in ad hoc trade aid payments to farmers, the bulk of them in 2018 and 2019. And the Economic Research Service projected in September that 40% of net farm income in the 2020 calendar year would come from COVID-19 relief from the government, such as $5.8 billion from the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program and an expected $16 billion in direct farm payments from the USDA.
That aid poses a risk for Biden. The funding infusions leave agriculture vulnerable to a 50% decline in government payments in 2021 if COVID-19 aid ends and exports haven’t rebounded, according to a University of Missouri report in September. That could be a $16 billion hit to net farm income, it said.