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It's been about two weeks since President Trump announced his 90-day pause on high import taxes on most U.S. trading partners, while at the same time ratcheting up tariffs with China. All of this back and forth is triggering anxiety among American farmers, and it comes at an especially delicate time. Many were already losing money, and some fear trade wars may lead to the worst farm crisis in almost half a century. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports.
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FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: On Glenn Brunkow's farm in eastern Kansas, it's about time to shear sheep and plant soybeans. Brunkow's livestock are lucrative this year, but the long hours he'll put in growing corn and soybeans are likely to cost him money.
GLENN BRUNKOW: This is a pretty tough time, to be honest. This is about as grim of time as I've seen for crop production. Nothing looks like it's going to make money right now.
MORRIS: It's mainly because everything that Brunkow has to buy to stay in business has gone through the roof, but crop prices are low. About a third of Kansas farmers have been operating in the red. Brunkow supports President Trump's efforts to rebalance global trade, but he fears farmers are in for it.
BRUNKOW: We're already stressed, and this doesn't help.
MORRIS: In the last few years, China has been buying between 25 and $42 billion worth of U.S. soybeans, corn, meat and other farm products each year. Trade war will likely shut that down. Meantime, Trump's import taxes are turbocharging inflation on farm equipment.
BRUNKOW: It means we hold onto stuff. We fix things instead of trading them off, and just make do with what we have.
MORRIS: But feeling that, a few miles away at the KanEquip dealership in Wamego, Kansas, parts program manager Doug Meinhardt says big tractors are generally assembled domestically. But most of the tractors on his lot are imported.
DOUG MEINHARDT: All the small tractors are made overseas. The medium-sized tractors are made, you know, in Europe. All the smaller ones are made over in Asia, and that's all going to have tariffs on it.
MORRIS: Meinhardt says the 1980s farm crisis triggered the shakeout in the tractor industry, consolidating production under a handful of global corporations with global supply chains. Back then, sky-high operating costs and low crop prices - the kind of thing happening now - drove thousands of U.S. farmers under.
MEINHARDT: I mean, a lot of equipment manufacturers and dealers went out of business in the '80s, too, and it could happen again.
MORRIS: A sense of foreboding is sweeping across farm country this spring.
MEINHARDT: There's a whole bunch of things that are happening at the same time, and none of them are good.
MORRIS: Vance Ehmke farms land in western Kansas, where his ancestors homesteaded in 1885.
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MORRIS: He chafes at Trump's suggestion that farmers should just sell lots more food inside the United States.
VANCE EHMKE: Annually, here in Kansas, we grow, say, 400 million bushels of wheat. Half of that has got to be exported. Period. I cannot eat two loaves of bread a day. That won't work. We got to export that.
MORRIS: So farmers have spent decades cultivating relationships with overseas buyers. Ehmke says Trump is upending this lucrative system and treating cherished patrons as if they were Old West bandits in nearby Dodge City.
V EHMKE: We've got really good customers in China, Canada, Australia. We're telling them, get the hell out of Dodge. Take your business and go someplace else.
MORRIS: Leaving U.S. farmers with a glut of unmarketable food and mounting bills. Louise Ehmke, Vance's wife of 53 years, keeps the books on this 14,000-acre farm. She says Trump's whipsaw tariffs are scrambling her business plans.
LOUISE EHMKE: Oh, it's no man's land or no woman's land. I mean, either way, whatever - where are we going and where are we going to end up is the concern.
MORRIS: Last time he was in office, Trump dipped into the treasury, spending $23 billion to compensate farmers for the damage caused by a much smaller trade war. Trump has pledged more of the same this time around, but many farmers say they'd rather depend on open markets than on another bailout from the Trump administration.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.
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