Following a turbulent few years under President Trump's policies, farmers across the US are trying to figure out what a Biden administration means for their futures.
Phil Ramsey, a fourth-generation farmer from Shelbyville, Indiana, supported President Trump in both 2016 and the most recent election. So now, he's worried about his place under a Joe Biden presidency.
“I’m concerned about being forgotten. And my concern is are they’re going to shut down government because of coronavirus,” said Ramsey whose crop prices took a hit at the height of the pandemic.
Farmers have been at the political forefront of President Trump’s administration. He has called them the “backbone of our country,” promising to make things better, but what ensued in the four years of his administration were trade policies that often hurt — not helped — US farmers.
The President launched a trade war with China that cut into farmers’ incomes in the form of Chinese tariffs on US agricultural exports. The Trump administration provided Market Facilitation Program payments to help offset their losses in revenue, but the funds often benefitted larger farms rather than family farmers.
Meanwhile, the spread of the coronavirus this year shut down meat packing facilities — forcing farmers to kill their livestock — and closed ethanol plants across the country, leaving farmers nowhere to sell the corn used in production.
Still, Trump’s supporters stuck by him in the rural parts of states, adding to his more than 71 million votes.
“I had confidence in his business experience,” said Ramsey, who believes China has held up their end of the Phase 1 US-China Trade agreement the President negotiated earlier this year.
After nearly three years, a partial agreement was reached between the US and China in mid-January, right before the pandemic struck. The two countries agreed China would buy $50 billion in agricultural products in the first two years in exchange for the US reducing some tariffs.
As of August, China was on pace to purchase less than half of what it had agreed to, according to an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Ramsey, like many farmers, is concerned President-elect Biden will undo many of the Trump policies popular with those in agriculture, such as the USMCA and Phase 1 of US-China Trade deal. However, Biden has not said he would undo either of those policies.