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The Cost of this War on the American Farmers. Well, and many of the effects of this Iran war are being felt right here at home. The cost of gas, the cost of transportation of goods, even the cost of fertilizer. Farmers who did not pre-buy it are now running into price increases of around 30 percent.
Well, that’s the beginning of today’s program about farming in the United States and the problemthat this war is bringing to the American farmer and to the American consumer as well. But this show is going to really center around farming in America and the result of what this war in Iran is doing. Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the place to go to find out what’s happening and if God has anything to do with it, because oftentimes God does, we just don’t hear it from the mainstream media.I’m going to continue with this little blurb here and then we’re going to talk about different outtakes about what’s happening in farming today in America and how this war is really affecting the farmers of America, more probably at any time in the last, I don’t know how many years, probably 20, 30, 40 years. News Channel 3’s Carter Landis joining us live in the studio tonight.And Carter, what is the Farm Bureau saying to you? Yeah, Jessica, farmers were dealing with record fertilizer prices before due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and this only further complicates things.And for the farmers who didn’t plan ahead, it could be difficult to get fertilizer before the planting season begins. As the Iran war rages on in the Middle East, it’s causing prices on gas and other important goods to rise. Theresa Sissing of the Michigan Farm Bureau says that includes fertilizer.And while American farmers don’t get it as much from the Middle East, the global market is reacting. Because it’s a global market, there’s demand all over globally, so that’s causing the price increase. Many farmers use a fertilizer called urea, which is a nitrogen release fertilizer specifically for corn and wheat, some of the biggest crops grown in Michigan.Sissing says one alternative farmers could consider is transitioning a portion of their corn acres to soybeans, although that’s less lucrative. You may reduce your costs, but you’re also going to reduce the profit that you receive from those crops because you’ll have less of a crop. Gas and oil prices are also increasing, so transportation costs are going up as well.And that could have an impact beyond the farm. We do see price increases at the grocery store.It’ll more than likely be because of the increases in transportation costs.Sissing says along with farmers having to consider switching crops, they’ve also had to reduce their nitrogen rates as a result of the fertilizer price increase. Sissing also says this issue will grow even more difficult for farmers if we get into the fall and the war is still ongoing. And the war is still ongoing as we speak right now.And I wanted to say where I’m located. My main paint plant is in rural Virginia, and I’m surrounded by house. I live in another town than my paint plant, but my house, as well as our paint plant is surrounded by huge factory type farms.But they are all in my area, unlike a lot of places around the country, all the farms in my area are owned by families. They’re owned by individual family people. They are not these big mega farms.Now I will admit I have to take that back because Smithfield Foods, which is now owned by the Chinese, do operate probably 35, 45 farms as well in their corporate factory farms around where we are. As a matter of fact, if I take a back way to work in the morning, I can go by four or five Smithfield hog farms where they raise the hogs that they butcher for Smithfield hams. And they are factory farms.But the majority of what’s around my house and what’s around our plant are family farms. And I know some of these well. One person that’s in Wakefield, our plant is in Virginia.He’s a very good friend of ours, and he’s a major farmer. He plants and farms about six or 7,000 acres. And he’s a major person in the area.He’s involved in a lot of community things. He’s very good for the community. He’s a very generous man.He runs the softball league in the town. He’s involved with young children. And he told me, and this was even before the war started, he was telling me because of the tariffs, he didn’t know what to plant yet.And it was still in March when they were preparing the fields. And he was afraid of planting soybeans because the major purchaser of soybeans right now was China. And he knows China had stopped buying soybeans and they were buying from Brazil.The next crop that he was thinking about was, of course, corn. And that’s always a good cash crop, especially for ethanol. And there’s an ethanol plant in Norfolk area.So he was thinking about that. He was also thinking about peanuts because peanuts are quite lucrative, but that’s a hit or a miss. And he didn’t know.So the last time I talked to him was about 35 days into the Iran war. And that’s when he started talking mainly about the fertilizer and about all the problems that were coming because of this war. Not just the fertilizer, but of course, the spike in fuel.His diesel price went up. And remember, farmers do not pay highway tax under diesel. Right now in my town, diesel is about $5.21 a gallon.Gas is about $3 a gallon. Diesel is always more money. It shouldn’t be.When I was a kid, it was the other way around. But to the farmer, they save about $0.80 to $0.90 a gallon because they do not pay any highway tax. Not state or Virginia, local county or federal highway tax on their diesel fuel.And he pays about, I think, around $3.99. And that, but he was paying $1.99 a year ago. And so, you know, when you’re on a tractor or your tractor is running and you got three or four of these, if you’ve seen the size of the tractors around us, they can’t even fit down the road. When they go down the road, one tire is on one edge of the road and the other tire is on the edge of the road.And God help you if you’re coming the other way. Because you have nowhere to go. You’re going to start backing up for a quarter of a mile until you find a driveway to pull into to let the guy by.That’s no lie. That’s how big these things are. They probably burn 200 gallons of fuel a day.I don’t know that for a fact. But by looking at the massive, so if you got three or four of these tractors running, every one of them taking 75 gallons a day, you’re probably burning 200 gallons of diesel a day. It takes about a month to prepare soil.So you do six days times 200. That’s just your fuel cost because of the war. And then you take the fertilizer cost.He says it’s doubled. Basically, in the last three years, the last year Biden and because of the Ukraine war and the first year, the last two years of Biden, I’m sorry, because of the Ukraine warand the first year under Trump because of the Ukraine war and now because of the Iran war, fertilizer is not only doubled in price and many times they can’t even buy what they need to plant.And if they don’t have nitrogen, for example, which you just heard urea is the name, but it’s really nitrogen.And certain crops need a lot of nitrogen. That is any grass like crop. If you want to make your lawn really get green before a rainstorm, spray it with nitrogen, let it rain on top of it.And the next day you’ll see such growth in green grass. You’ll be mowing it three times a week after that for a couple of months. And that’s what it does.Well, corn is a grass. Wheat is a grass. Rye is a grass.Rice, people who grow rice is a grass. These are all grasses need a lot of nitrogen. Now, peanuts, cotton, soybeans do not need that much nitrogen.And they can get enough nitrogen from the rye that is growing over the wintertime that when they let the rye die and they bury, you know, they, they, they haul it into the ground. They wheel it into the ground. They don’t, they plant, they practice no-till farming around here.They don’t use a plow, but they do use harrows. And that will give enough nitrogen for peanuts, for cotton and for soybeans. So this is the dilemma that the farmers faced back in March and Aprilwhen they were planting because they didn’t know what to plant.And I’m looking around now and I’m looking at the crops that I see that was planted. And I haven’t talked to this person lately that owns the big farm in my area of the plant, but the one across the street from me and they, they farm like 10,000 acres. I noticed that the majority of what is growing right now is corn and I believe it has to be corn for ethanol.I’m not sure about this, but usually corn grown for grain is about 12 to 18 feet high. It’s about 10 feet high when it tassels and it grows another four to five feet and the ears of corn are about 18 inches long. Well, I’ve noticed, and I used to grow sweet corn as a young person.I put myself through college running a country stand in Connecticut, selling sweet corn and tomatoes and vegetables. And as a matter of fact, our company, Tamco, got its seed money when after 10 years, my wife and I went back up. My mother was running the stand after I did when I moved to Florida.And we went back up in the summer of 1988 and ran it again and made enough money to start Tamco, believe it or not. And that’s the seed money for my big paint company that is today came from that. So I know a lot about corn and about sweet corn.Well, what I’ve noticed is around here, the corn that they’re growing is about the size of sweet corn. But I know the farmers around here are not raised in sweet corn and it doesn’t really look like sweet corn, but it’s no more than five or six feet high. And the only thing I told my wife, I think it must be, it must be a corn that’s very high in sugar, like a sweet corn.Because if you know anything about making ethanol, and that is what the corn they take. They take corn and they turn it into ethanol by a fermenting process, like you’re making booze. You ferment it with yeast and stuff like that, and it ferments.Well, the higher the sugar content, the easier and the more alcohol you will get out of a product.When you’re trying to distill beer, for example, and ferment it into an alcoholic drink, if you add a little bit of sugar to it, sometimes they do honey when you see a honey ale or something like that,that is actually causing the fermentation process to happen quicker and more abundantly. And it’ll raise your alcohol content.I used to brew some beer here as a hobby. I haven’t done it in many years, but I remember one time putting too much sugar in it and the five and a half percent alcohol beer turned out to be 12%. And it was bubbling like a soda.It had so much carbonation to it as well from all the sugar. And so I’m thinking what I’m seeing around here is a specialty crop now just for ethanol. And it makes sense that they are making ethanol, and that was the crop they decided on.They realized they couldn’t sell to China, and they realized that they couldn’t sell to a lot of our allies, because believe it or not, Europe is not buying our products. I’ll give you a side example of this. You know the containers that ship, you know, these container ships and you get containers,those big steel 40-foot long containers that hold goods coming from China? Well, I get all my raw material in these containers, and I average two to three containers a month.We’re a big company now. And used to even be more before this bad economy. But there is such a shortage of containers in China, there are now all the containers basically coming from Chinaare being made in China brand new.Every container coming is brand new. The reason they’re not getting containers back, you can’t ship empty containers back to China. The ships will not be heavy enough, and they will not go down in the water enough.So all these containers are stacking up on American soil, and that is why, and I’ve bought so far two so far of my own, I’m going to buy another two, buying containers to store product in, finished goods or raw material, dirt cheap. They used to be $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a container. Now you can get them for $1,500, $2,000 a container.And the reason you can do that, the reason you can do that is because there is an absolute glut of containers in America, because we are not shipping back to China. Our shipping to China is at an all-time low. Our deficit, our trade deficit that Donald Trump made a big deal about is at an all-time high.We don’t hear about that because it’s not good news coming out of the White House. So they just ignore those statistics about how bad our trade deficit is. But getting back to the farmers, here’s another report from Georgia about what Trump’s war is costing farmers.And almost 80% of American farmers voted for Donald Trump. Now they’re getting crushed by the skyrocketing fuel, fertilizer supply costs, largely thanks to Donald Trump’s Iran war. On top of that, they’re facing a record drought because of a climate crisis going on.And by the way, I’m not into a climate crisis. What I mean, there is a heat wave. This is the longest time in Virginia I can remember in the some, what, 30 years I’ve lived here that we’ve had the driest spring and early summer in memory.We have gone at one stretch four weeks without one-tenth of an ounce of rain. It almost reminds you of the Mojave Desert. But anyway, between the drought and the war, farmers in Georgia, Virginia, the Midwest, and as far as California are being squeezed.Here’s the story. It’s springtime in Burke County, Georgia, planting season. But this year, the outlook for many farmers is grim.President Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Has jolted American farmers sharply raising what they pay for fuel, fertilizer,and many other necessities.So how is this year looking for you financially? I’m not even gonna lie, it’s tough. It’s tough.Probably the toughest it’s been for me.And farming since the middle 80s. Since the farm crisis. Wow.Carson Cross grows soybeans and corn here in Burke County. Like every farmer in America, he’s reckoning with new realities. First off, fertilizer has increased probably 25% since the straight has been closed.Fuel also. I mean, you know, where fuel costs before were around $350. Now I’m paying $525 for it.For diesel? Yeah, non-tax diesel. The price of fuel seems everyone here is talking about it. Brad Edenfield farms 3,700 acres, not far from Carson Cross.What are you paying for diesel now? So it’s over $5 a gallon for diesel, you know. And how much do you use? I mean, in a given month, I’m probably buying $10,000 to $15,000 worth a month of fuel. And that was pre-priced.So now we’re looking at that being more like a $20,000 to $25,000 bill. So you’re talking $10,000 plus potentially in a given year, you know, maybe $100,000 in a year. It could impact us that much.Now, again, it’s not always that high, but that’s just where we are. The thing is, we always said, you know, we’re the one person that has to buy everything at retail and sell everything at wholesale. That’s where farmers are.We buy everything we buy at retail. We sell everything we sell at wholesale. So we are affected immediately whenever there’s any type of cost adjustment.You know what I’m saying? Whenever there’s any type of surcharge, whether it be from tariff, fuel, you name it, whatever it is, we’re going to be affected first. One thing you hear over and over from farmers here in Brooke County is this is not a simple story. President Trump’s tariffs, his war against Iran, those are just the latest blows, they say, to a farm economy that’s been challenged for years.Over the last decade, American farming has changed dramatically. New technologies, new costs, new competition. Farmers here say American farm policy has not kept up with the times.And that failure in Washington, in Congress, just makes everything worse. Lee Webster has farmed this county for more than 50 years. He’s seen ups, downs, and everything in between.I would describe it this way. We’re looking at, in my lifetime, what I would consider to be the third cycle of extreme ups and downs. And what I mean by cycle is where you can identify a placewhere what you were doing before is no longer workable.You’re at the mercy of just about everything else. Weather, war, prices, all kinds of things. And I would put them all under the category of extremes.And whatever creates that extreme and unexpected extreme, that’s what you’re at the mercy of.And then you have to make these decisions which, if that occurs after you’ve put a seed in the ground, you’re at the mercy of whatever you’re in the middle of. This year… And that is, by the way, the biggest problem that the farmers I talked to, they were facing in the springtime.They didn’t know really what to plant because they couldn’t find a consistent policy of this administration to give them any idea what they should do. And so a lot of them planted crops that they didn’t know if they were going to even make money. For example, if they were to raise a lot of soybeans, and this is what I was told by this friend of mine by my plant, if he was to plant soybeans, it’s a very low-paying crop.And with the cost of fertilizer, for example, and the cost of diesel fuel, he probably would actually lose money with every acre of soybean that he grew. But it would be better than nothing because there are subsidies they can get from the federal government and things like that. But it’s still a policy of trying to figure out exactly what to do.And if he planted, like for example, if he planted… By the way, the soybeans would have been very lucrative if you could sell them to China because China cannot raise its own soybeans. But now that Brazil has the Chinese market, the bottom has fallen out of soybeans. And that’s why there’s no longer a good crop.Same with peanuts. He said, Virginia peanuts are the best peanuts in the world and people pay premium for them. But the truth is, peanuts from Georgia are what you really buy when you buy peanuts in a store.You know, dry roasted peanuts. They’re all from Georgia or from overseas. You know, India produces a lot of peanuts.People don’t realize that. So peanuts now are not as lucrative of a crop as they once were. I’ll be right back with the rest of this story and the rest about the dilemma farmers are following.This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. The Plain Truth Today is a unique broadcast. It’s Monday through Friday, three times a day, 7-11 in the morning,noontime, it’s usually a show by me at noon, and evening time at 7-11 p.m. On Saturday, which is the Sabbath day, we have a 7-11 a.m. Sabbath show. And we do not have a noontime show on the Sabbath day, but at 7-11 p.m., we usually have an entertainment show, a movie, a short story, or a TV show from the past.Sundays, we have a 7-11 a.m. show, the only show on Sundays, and it’s usually a weekly wrap-up that’s not by me. The weekly wrap-up by me is usually Fridays at 7-11 p.m. We do not do a noontime show Friday. We usually put up a YouTube video for noon, but Friday evening is when I do the Friday wrap-up.That’s The Plain Truth Today. You find that by going to theplaintruth.com every day. Thank you very much.Appreciate you listening. And we’re back with the vinyl here, and I want to just get into the last part of this article that was on YouTube, What Trump’s Iran War Is Costing Farmers. And this is a Georgia story from a Georgia station.And I’m going to finish up with a few more comments. And we can just understand why your food is going through the roof, by the way. And it’s not the farmers getting rich.The middleman has really, really taken advantage of the farmer and of you and this war. There’s money to be made in a war, but most of the time, you and I are not making the money, neither is the farmer. It’s the people in the middle with all the money.Here, the crisis has a second layer. The drought here is among the worst in living memory. This is corn, first stand of corn coming up.That, of course, is water. That’s watering this field. There’s a problem with that.This is April, mid-April. And in this part of the country, they should not have to water their fields,paying to get that water up and out over the fields. But there’s a drought.You can see it. That pivot only goes so far. The corn it won’t reach won’t get watered.There’s some research that some of these meetings that I go to, they’re talking about every 97 years or so, we kind of have these extreme droughts. The Dust Bowl was actually the last time this happened, and they were recommending it would start sometime in August, September. It absolutely did for us.We had a crop, luckily, that was made at that point, but it just turned off like a spigot, and we’ve had one of the driest winter I can remember in my lifetime. My son picks on me and asks me why I don’t gamble. And I tell him, well, son, I gamble to make the money that we have, and I don’t feel like it’s right.God would judge me if I gambled with what he allowed me to win, because it is absolutely that. I say, we put a seed in the ground, and we pray that it’s going to rain and make a crop for us, and it really is that way. Already the weather, now the economics.Brad Edenfield describes farmers in his community who simply cannot keep going. I felt like we just had our nose above water, and now we just added another six inches on top of it. So it’s critical.I think there’s a number of farmers, I know even in our area, that have, they’ve either, they’re giving it up, you know, they’re selling the land. Because of what’s happening? Because of, well, not just the war. This was, some of them had already committed even back in December, just because, again, we’re going through five years of poor pricing, you know what I’m saying? High input costs.It’s a struggle, and they’re not seeing a way, they’re at retirement age, and they’re having to borrow more money than they’ve ever borrowed in their life to keep trying to do it. A few miles from Carson Cross’s fields, the Prescott family has a different story, though the same pressures. I love what I do.I wouldn’t do anything else. You couldn’t put me in an office job, make me stay there. This is a blessing.Every day, I thank God for the opportunity. I’ve got a six-month-old son that every day I look at this, I think, how do I make this better for him to take over one day? This is the only form of legalized gambling where they tell you, go borrow all the money you can to put it out here and make a living and pay the bank back. Sid Prescott is 25.Rob is 30. They’re almost anomalies. Only 9% of American farmers are under 35.And I guess seeing other farmers go out over the years was tough. Watching them go broke, and then, like, it made you want to do it that much more, to be that much better. It’s interesting that you say that watching some of the farmers leave the land, right, go broke and leave the land,inspires you? It does.It makes you want to do something that much more, because it’s like the world’s against you, but you got to beat it. But their challenges this year are stacking up, and one of them has nothing to do with Iran or tariffs. I would say the scariest factor is the fact that the screw worm is at Mexico’s border and can be here in three days.What’s a screw worm? The screw worm is a fly that lays a larva on animals, and it eats like the flesh off of the animal. And so it’s tearing up Central and South America’s beef. That’s why we’re not, America’s not letting beef from those countries in right now.I see. I didn’t know that. How concerned are you? Pretty concerned, because the last time we had screw worms was the 50s, and it killed millions of cows.So, you know, do you think there is a biblical plague going on here with the American farmer?Well, I do, and that’s what this show has been about for the longest time. If you understand the Bible, you also understand that the United States of America is really a tribe of lost Israel. Nobody knows it.Very few people, I should say, know it. We know it, and we try to let our listener understand it, that we are the Ephraim, of the Bible, and we are cursed for not obeying God and obeying God’s laws.We’re under a curse.The curse is going to be magnified, and we’re seeing it with a drought, with a screw room, screw worm, I’m sorry. We’re seeing it with wars. We’re seeing it with wars all over the place.And everything is working against the American government, against the American people,against the American economy and the American farmer. And the American farmer is going awayas we think of the American farmer. I’m talking about the family American farm is being bought up by corporate farms like Smithfield Foods that has deep pockets, and they know how to get moneyout of the government.They give money to politicians who give money back to them in the form of aid and welfare for farmers. When you hear about all this welfare for farmers and bankruptcy loopholes for farmers,that doesn’t apply to the family farmer. It only applies to the big corporate farmer that knows how to use their power, their prestige, and their money to make more money and to get a lot of more money back from the United States government.And that’s the welfare farmers you always hear about, Bernie Sanders talking about, or other people talking about. They’re not the farmer we just covered today, the farmer that is struggling,the farmer that is going out of business, and the farmer that is feeding half of the American population, if not a quarter of the entire world. And they’re going away.And they’re going away because of God with nature, with God with just turning his back on the American nation because we’ve turned our back on God. And if we do not turn around and go to God in prayer and repentance of our sins, which is not obeying his laws, we have churches trying to tell you his law has been abolished when they have not been abolished. We got a problem coming.We got a problem coming that I’m sorry to say is not gonna be very fun to live through for anybody. And if you’re one of these smug Christians who believe in the rapture and you’re not gonna be here for it all, you got a big surprise coming because there is no rapture. There’s no rapture found in the Bible.God does not rapture his people out of trouble. God protects his people when they’re in trouble,but they go through all tribulations. Do they not? Look what happened to the early Christians in Rome, being burned at the stake, crucified upside down, fed to the lions.They weren’t raptured to heaven, were they? Neither will you be. And if you believe in the theoryof the rapture, you have just fallen victim of another satanic lie being propagated by churches today in the name of Christianity, which are really just pagan, satanic churches. This is Bob Barneyfor The Plain Truth Today brought to you by theplaintruth.com. I appreciate all those who are listening.Please come back tomorrow and listen to another show and always tune in three times a day on Monday through Friday, 7, 11 a.m., p.m. and noontime for other shows other than my own on The Plain Truth Today broadcast. Thank you. Bye-bye.