Agricultural Digest
President Donald Trump’s shutdown of USAID has the agriculture industry aflutter. The shutdown has already got farmers and their advocates speaking up about the loss of guaranteed income from programs like Food for Peace, which bought up excess grain and shipped it to countries in need. John Boyd Jr., President of the National Black Farmers Association, told NewsNation Prime that these cuts could bring “havoc and devastation” to family farmers. In Kansas, the loss of Food for Peace means a pileup of sorghum (or “milo”) with nowhere to go and no one to buy it. Kim Barnes, the chief financial officer of the Pawnee County co-op in Larned, told the Topeka Capital-Journal, “There’s just no market in the world today for milo.” In other words, the US taxpayer has been subsidizing the production of a grain with minor free-market value (being about par for American agriculture, with roughly 39 percent of US farms receiving subsidies from the federal government in some form), which the US …