The
President will address the annual Farm Bureau conference in Nashville.
Bloomberg says farmers “are searching for a sign that their issues mean as much
to him as their votes do.”
As he
approaches his first anniversary in office, the president is struggling to
fulfill his campaign promises to segments of his voting base, including
farmers, and his approval ratings have been stuck at historically low levels,
Bloomberg said.
These
include, especially, threatened withdrawal from NAFTA, immigration restrictions
that could choke the flow of migrants to harvest U.S. crops and proposals to
cut crop-insurance payments popular in agriculture. These and other
administration policies run contrary to the positions represented by Farm
Bureau, the biggest U.S. farmer organization.
Still,
Trump’s ties to rural voters are far from broken despite some strains,
Johnathan Hladik, policy director for the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons,
Nebraska, told Bloomberg. “A lot of farm interests have felt overlooked or
ignored in the first year of the Trump administration,” he said. “Farm Bureau
is the place where you can get the most people in one place and rally the
troops.”
The
Farm Bureau has a wide reach, with offices in 2,795 of the nation’s 3,144
counties. It’s long been recognized as the top farmer group in Washington,
where agribusiness is listed as the 10th-biggest industry in campaign
contributions, just behind energy and ahead of construction, transportation and
defense, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. The
Farm Bureau spent more than $3 million on lobbying in 2017, second only to
Monsanto Co. among organizations that serve farmers.
It’s
also long been associated with conservative politics, although farmer tend to
be swing voters, especially in states such as North Dakota and Indiana, where
incumbent Democratic Senators Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly are up for
re-election in 2018. Trump won both states last year.
Since
the end of a commodities boom in 2013, crop prices have been stable, but low.
Futures for corn, the most-valuable crop, closed last year at just over $3.50 a
bushel, a fall of 0.4 percent from the previous year. Livestock has fared
better, with cattle futures traded in Chicago up 4.7 percent, but well below
boom-time prices. That has farm-state members of Congress calling for more
generous payments under a new law governing farm subsidies due this year.
In
addition, farming is one of the few sectors of the U.S. economy with a trade
surplus. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has touted the benefits of the
NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico, even as the President threatened to
scrap the deal. The sluggish economy and at-odds position on trade and other
issues, such as immigration, that many farmers see as necessary for their harvests,
means farmer support for Trump can’t be taken for granted, said former Senator
Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican who served as chairman of the Senate
Agriculture Committee.
In
general, the President has not talked a lot about farmers, Lugar said.
“Somebody probably said to the Trump hierarchy that the president better go to
the Farm Bureau and show some interest in agriculture,” Lugar said. “Changes to
the corporate tax may create jobs, but this is not reflected in the lives or
outlooks of many farmers.”
“One of
Trump’s campaign promises was he would get regulations off our back, and you
can see that happening,” said Scott VanderWal, a corn and soybean grower near
Volga, South Dakota, 50 miles north of Sioux Falls. The president would get
more done if Congress were more aligned with him, VanderWal said.
Josh
Ogle, a 40-year-old grower of cotton, corn, soybeans and wheat in Lincoln
County, Tennessee, just north of the Alabama border, said he is “very pleased
with the president’s first year.” His county gave Trump 78% of its vote in
2016.
“Secretary
Perdue at USDA, Scott Pruitt at EPA, just to see these men in charge who are
bullish about rural America and are taking a common-sense approach to rural
America’s problems” by lowering taxes and relaxing regulations to create jobs,
he said.
So, it
will be important to note what the President says at Nashville, and especially
whether he supports or opposes the access to North American markets under
NAFTA. The AFBF has a reputation as a strong, strong supporter of access to
foreign markets, so the Nashville conversation certainly could be important in
this election year, Washington Insider believes.