U.S. disaster aid won't cover crops drowned by Midwest floods

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

POLITICS APRIL 2, 2019 / 1:10 AM / 2 DAYS AGO

U.S. disaster aid won't cover crops drowned by Midwest floods

Tom Polansek
6 MIN READ

MALVERN, Iowa (Reuters) - The Black Hawk military helicopter flew over Iowa, giving a senior U.S. agriculture official and U.S. senator an eyeful of the flood damage below, where yellow corn from ruptured metal silos spilled out into the muddy water.

And there’s nothing the U.S. government can do about the millions of bushels of damaged crops here under current laws or disaster-aid programs, U.S. Agriculture Under Secretary Bill Northey told a Reuters reporter who joined the flight.

The USDA has no mechanism to compensate farmers for damaged crops in storage, Northey said, a problem never before seen on this scale. That’s in part because U.S. farmers have never stored so much of their harvests, after years of oversupplied markets, low prices and the latest blow of lost sales from the U.S. trade war with China - previously their biggest buyer of soybean exports.

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.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-iowa/u-s-disaster-aid-wont-cover-crops-drowned-by-midwest-floods-idUSKCN1RE0BU

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Sad to say,stories about tha 12 billion dollars

going to the Farmers are saying,only the mega Farms seen those dollars while the small operators received only pennies. These dollars ended up with the like of Circle 4 farms which btw ,China owned and a part of Smithfield Foods.

Another is a Fellow who lives here in Nevada who Runs a Massive Poultry operation and owns a paving company. Yah right,none of his Contract Growers have seen a dime.

But again,these Farmers propped up Trump only to have experienced what many New Yorker's have experienced for years from Trump. He will screw you six ways to Sunday and twice on Sunday.

[msongs]

2. well in free and open markets w/competition they must have bought insurance against

such losses, correct, rather than waiting for a socialist government bailout

[pbmus]

3. Actually they are relying on Big Con tariffs to come to their rescue...

[rlegro]

4. Have you paid attention to farm economics at all?

Thanks to production oversupply and corporate mega-farms that serve to make that worse, family-n ty and medium-sized farms in many cases were underwater financially before the flood waters came. They're losing money on every bushel or every gallon of milk they sell.

Further, I am unaware of any private insurance that will compensate for a disaster of the above magnitude, even if farmers could afford the premiums. They can get compensation for some of the crops damaged in the field and sometimes for dead cattle, but what about damaged harvests that farmers increasingly have stored in silos, because the market price is so low and that's the only alternative to dumping the product? Not really.

One can be libertarian about this and say, well, if farmers go bust because of bad weather or disaster or other crop damage, that's just the market correcting itself. Except then we're putting our faith in fewer, much larger agri-companies, some of them foreign-owned and quite willing to ship the harvest back to their homelands, too many of them furthermore using nonsustainable growing practices that damage crop and forage lands in exchange for short-term profit. And undermining wholly American farms in the process. Wisconsin has lost 800 more dairy farms thanks to unprofitability in the past year or so. Meanwhile, "free-market" types in our state government keep granting new permits to allow more dairy factories with 10,000 or more cows in "concentrated feeding operations" -- not only wiping out additional smaller farms that practice sustainability but massively polluting local community water wells with their huge manure run-off.

What's "free" or "open" about any of that? And when the climate changes for the worse and our nation's surplus food production is increasingly underwater or broiled by hotter climes and vanishing groundwater, then what? Another food dust bowl or 12.`