The farmers who spoke at a Sept. 2 meeting with congressional officials in Brookland, Arkansas, were respectful, plain-spoken and worried, according to the 4-minute, 30-second report aired by KAIT News, Jonesboro, and posted on YouTube afterwards.
None, however, could have anticipated the anger their pleas for federal farm assistance ignited when the video went viral.
Within a week of the report’s online posting, 25,237 comments — most packed with resentment and invective — poured into YouTube. Many echoed someone calling herself @SamanthaUniverse, who demanded the farmers “Put your red hats back on …NO HANDOUTS.”
Another suggested that the farmers “Call Eric Trump, he made 500 million yesterday.” Over 9,500 people endorsed that comment with a thumbs-up emoji while none disagreed.
Equally remarkable, the straight-down-the-middle news report of the public meeting received an astonishing 826,000 views within four days.
Unsurprisingly, however, the federal officials hosting the meeting — identified as staffers from the offices of Arkansas senators John Boozman and Tom Cotton and local Congressman Rick Crawford — played it close to their MAGA-red vests.
Their post-meeting joint press statement was a bowl of warm milk: fat-free promises that the July-passed Trump tax bill, “once implemented, will help economic challenges and natural disasters to preserve family farms…”
Not likely; most of the bill’s modest tools are a year from taking effect, and nothing in it addresses farmers’ two most pressing concerns now: Trump tariffs choking off vital U.S. export markets and fast-rising prices on key inputs like machinery, seed and fertilizer.
“So how can this be fixed?” the KAIT News reporter asked an attendee.
“In the short-term,” explained the farmer, “they have no choice but to mail us a check. I don’t know a farmer who likes a check program. Nobody wants to take the taxpayer money, but nobody wants to go broke…”
Of course not, but that prescription — another government bailout offered as a matter of fact — tipped commenters into anger. Few saw another government bailout of farmers as a matter of fact.
Noted one, “Farming 101: reap what you sow!” Another wrote, “Thoughts and prayers.”
Anger aside, the farmer who suggested the government has “no choice but to mail us a check” is probably right. Sending the nation’s dwindling number of farmers ever-bigger federal checks isn’t a solution; it is, in fact, an admission of failure.
Failure in that the United States’ now 30-year-old farm policy — essentially Freedom to Farm with heavily subsidized crop insurance — needs to be overhauled if we’re to help feed a hotter, more crowded, increasingly resource-depleted world in the near future.
Furthermore, using today’s shrinking U.S. farmland base to grow “sustainable fuels” like ethanol and biodiesel makes no sense if the world must double food production over the next 25 years to sustain a forecasted population of 10 billion.
The two biggest alternatives to that truth, billions fewer people or finding 30% more land worldwide — the equivalent of 10 Californias — to grow the needed food are not just absurdly unlikely, they’re madness.
Mad, too, is ag’s weak-kneed view of climate change. If American farmers don’t speak out against today’s climate-denying White House and its announced policies that promise dirtier air and water, why shouldn’t farmer-supporting American taxpayers howl at the very idea of underwriting even more climate denial?
There are other problems — a Farm Bill rewrite more than 700 days overdue, wooden-headed tariff policy, an economic plan that fuels more unemployment than opportunity and a brutal immigration crackdown that’s removed more than one million workers from farms, factories and families.
So, yeah, the people listening to the Arkansas farmers were angry. Their gripes were also real, and, unlike many farmers today, they didn’t have to rationalize their beliefs.
