Farmers No Compensation for Millions of $ of Soybeans

[seemslikeadream]

Farmers in the Midwest are in fact experiencing a horrific economic and environmental crisis that no one is alleviating. The Trump admin couldn't care less.

Grain silos that burst from flood damage in Fremont County, Iowa, on March 29, 2019.Tom Polansek / Reuters
Farmers won't be compensated for millions of dollars of soybeans lost after floods and trade war
Farmers will have to destroy all grain contaminated by floodwater, and many are worried about making good on previously signed contracts to deliver crops.
Image: Grain silos that burst from flood damage in Fremont County, Iowa, on March 29, 2019.

April 2, 2019, 9:54 AM CDT / Source: Reuters
By Reuters
There's nothing the government can do about the millions of bushels of damaged crops in Iowa and other flooded states, since the Department of Agriculture has no program that covers the catastrophic and largely uninsured stored-crop losses from the widespread flooding that was triggered by the "bomb cyclone" that hit the region in mid-March.

The USDA last year made $12 billion in aid available to farmers who suffered trade-war losses, without needing Congressional approval. The agency has separate programs that partially cover losses from cattle killed in natural disasters, compensate farmers who cannot plant crops due to weather, and help them remove debris left in fields after floods.

But Congress would have to pass legislation to address the harvests lost in the storm, according to Agriculture Under Secretary Bill Northey and a USDA statement to Reuters.




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"It's not traditionally been covered," he said. "But we've not usually had as many losses."

Indigo Ag, an agriculture technology company, identified 832 on-farm storage bins within flooded Midwest areas. They hold an estimated 5 million to 10 million bushels of corn and soybeans — worth between $17.3 million and $34.6 million — that could have been damaged in the floods, the company told Reuters.

Across the United States, farmers held soybean stocks of 2.716 billion bushels as of March 1, the largest on record for the time period, the USDA said. Corn stocks were the third-largest on record.

Some Congress members have expressed interest in pursuing legislation to provide aid for damaged crops in storage, Northey said. But passing legislation could require a lengthy political process in the face of an urgent disaster, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told farmers at a meeting in Malvern, Iowa.

"If we have to pass a bill to do it, I hate to tell you how long that takes," said Grassley.

With farm incomes declining for years before the flood, many farmers had planned to sell their grain in storage for money to live, pay their taxes or finance operations, including planting this spring.

Farmers will have to destroy any grains that were contaminated by floodwater, which could also prevent some growers from planting oversaturated fields.

Near Crescent, Iowa, farmer Don Rief said the flood damaged more than 60,000 bushels of his grain, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He tried to move the crops before the flood, but dirt roads were too soft from the storm to support trucks.

"We were just hurrying like hell," Rief said. "Hopefully USDA will come in and minimize some of the damage."

The USDA does not have a program that covers flood-damaged grain because farmers have typically received more advance notice of rising waters, allowing them to move crops and limit losses, said Tom Vilsack, who ran the agency under former President Barack Obama.

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In this case, floods inundated fields quickly after multiple levees failed when rain and melting snow filled the Missouri River and other waterways. The frozen ground was unable to soak up the water.

Near Percival, Iowa, railroad tracks leading up to a grain facility were flooded and broken. A Deere & Co dealership, Wendy's restaurant, Motel 6, and gas station nearby were also underwater, along with homes, cars and farm equipment. Some farmers moved machinery such as tractors on to highways to keep it out of the path of the floods.

About 416,000 acres of cropland across six counties in Iowa were flooded, said Amanda De Jong, state executive director for the USDA Iowa Farm Service Agency.

Of that, about 309,000 acres will be eligible for the federal program that helps farmers and ranchers remove debris left by natural disasters on farmlands, De Jong said last week. She estimated the program would need about $34 million to clean up the fields.

Iowa's agriculture secretary Mike Naig said the government also should help compensate farmers for some of the grain that was damaged.

"This is clearly a gap that we think needs to be addressed," said Naig, who accompanied Grassley and Northey in the chopper.

Time is short for a solution, said Carol Vinton, supervisor of Mills County, Iowa, one of the state's two most heavily damaged counties.

Vinton said she was getting calls from farmers whose grain was damaged and are worried about making good on previously signed contracts to deliver those crops to elevators.

The USDA wants to do everything it can to help farmers hurt by the disaster, Northey said.

"They spent all last year raising that crop, putting it in the bin and they maybe already have it marketed," he said. "And now they're going to have to spend time just to get rid of it — just to clean the place up."
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/busine ... er-n989956

[seemslikeadream]

4/02/2019

The Trump-Forsaken, Flood-Fucked Farmers and Tribes
A state of emergency exists right now (or existed within the past week) for the Crow Reservation in Montana, as well as in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation and the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota, all due to the insane, ongoing flooding from a sudden huge snowfall and sudden warm up that suddenly caused that sudden snow to become sudden water. In Nebraska, the Ponca and Santee Sioux tribes were affected by the floods, too.

The floods washed away a water line at Pine Ridge and while it was being repaired, the reservation didn't have safe drinking water. The waters have also prevented people from being able to get to grocery stores and pharmacies, and that's in a place of 20,000 people, half of whom live below the poverty line, where health problems are an issue without the roads to the doctor and, well, food being cut off.

What does it mean that the road was cut off? Here's what one highway in Iowa looked like a few days ago:


How fucked are things in the Midwest right now? Those Iowa roads will take months to repair, with some not expected to open until the fall because the ground is so saturated they can't even get in the construction equipment to start work.

Oh, and the water in all these places is likely fucked, especially for people who rely on wells. See, floods tends to take anything they wash over with them, including shit and poison that covers the farms all over the region. That shit and poison is now polluting the wells. In 300 counties in 10 states are over a million people who rely on water from ground wells that could get a dose of poisonous shit water. We're not even talking about the Superfund clean-up sites that were already contaminated and that were hit by the floods in Nebraska and Missouri. More free-flowing chemical nightmares.

And there's the farmers. Yeah, that contaminated flood water is also fucking up the lives of thousands of farmers. It's not just that whatever crops they thought they might grow are gone. It's that the grain and soybeans they had in storage got contaminated by the poisonous shit water. That means that what a farmer hoped to sell to make up for how terrible things might be with the crops is now mostly going to have to be destroyed. And currently, the USDA doesn't have a fund to assist farmers with crops and stored grain lost in floods. Hundreds of thousands of acres of farm land were or are underwater. For soybean farmers already getting fucked by Trump's trade war with China, it's a double blow.

Trump is talking a good pro-farmer game right now as he intensifies his hate-fucking of Puerto Rico, which he sees as less worthy of government help than the almighty farmer. But Trump's 2020 budget proposal fucks over farmers nearly as badly; it cuts the budget of the USDA by over 14%, or $3.6 billion, and lowers the crop insurance subsidies for farmers, as well as capping what small farmers can get. Plus, if he closes the border with Mexico, well, that closes a huge market for American crops.

Just a continuous fucking by the potent combination of utter incompetence, complete ignorance, and willful dickishness that is the standard operating ethos of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, the one issue that combines all of these issues, from South Dakota to Puerto Rico, climate change, ain't even on Trump's radar. But you can sure as hell bet it's on the minds of farmers. They fuckin' know, even if they want to pretend otherwise. The same goes for immigration issues. They know how shit works.

Of course, they're gonna have to figure out if their farms matter more than their racism in 2020.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/04/ ... rmers.html