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Area farmers feeling impact of hefty U.S., foreign tariffs

United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny √ recently launched the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) trade mitigation package of up to $12 billion for farmers around the country. The package is intended to assist farmers amidst an unsettling trade war that continues to inch down profit margins — a quasi-irreversible, bitter reality farmers have been battling since before the Trump presidency.
McLeod County is a dense repository for everything agriculture. A 2012 census conducted by the USDA reported McLeod farmers’ land use to be 263,885 acres — 85 percent of land in the county. Though the number of individual farms between 2007 and 2012 has decreased by 5 percent within county borders, the total land used by farms increased by 8 percent and the average size of a farm increased by 14 percent in the same time frame, according to the census. Farmers, though decreasing in numbers, aren’t decreasing in production.
The importance of farmers to the county can’t be over-emphasized — an axiomatic truth to many rural counties across the United States — and government agricultural stipend programs don’t usually benefit a farmer like many would like to think. The USDA says the trade mitigation package will allow farmers to sign up for government programs that will aid them in finding new markets or even buy crops directly from farmers for food distribution programs.

(For the complete story, see the Sept. 26 edition of The Chronicle.)