Hello everybody out there in farm country. This radio commentary is brought to you by the National Corn Growers Association, CropLife America, and Renewable Fuels Association. They are all friends, supporters, and allies of a healthy farm economy and prosperous rural America. Thank you.
And now for today’s commentary –
I’m Karina Jones, Field Director for R-CALF USA, filling in for former US Secretary of Ag, John Block.
A nation that cannot feed itself, is not free! One by one, it seems that American agriculture industries have been placed on the altar of globalism to become sacrificial offerings to the trade powers. Consumers save a few pennies. We call that winning. Domestic production of goods becomes outsourced. American ag products become burdensome to our own economy and market that values cheap over local. Producers with boots on the ground can see the fragility and the error in the direction that powers have taken us, but it doesn’t seem like we can change the course. Until…until, a global supply chain disruption occurs and then everyone is standing in the same aisle at the grocery store staring at empty shelves.
While globalization may provide marginally cheaper food at a certain moment, it undermines our domestic producers and devalues our domestic product to a point that we are being forced to produce below the cost production. Every farmer and rancher listening knows how this tale ends. The systematic loss of ag operations. The contraction of that domestic herd or industry. The strengthening reliance on other countries to feed us.
For sake of example, I want to put a microscope on the American sheep industry. In a span of 30 years, from 1992 to 2022, the domestic sheep herd has fallen from nearly 11 million head to tipping around 5 million head, the lowest inventory on record. The US once boasted a vibrant, thriving sheep industry, like many of our ag industries they are simply a shell of what they once were. But just across the border, Canada has capitalized on this opportunity to fill our sheep market. Imports of Canadian slaughter sheep were around 31,500 head in 2022, based on weekly data from USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). This is the largest number of slaughter imports in 20 years. 75% of our imported lamb comes from Australia who has a bullseye on capturing this countries lamb market just like Brazil has a bullseye on capturing our beef market amid domestic cattle herd contraction. Plagued by rising input costs, like the rest of us, inflation and over all exhaustion among producers, now would be a great time for America to stand up and fight for this industry and the rest of American agriculture.
When will lawmakers take a hard look at the wrong road they have taken this country down and realize that this may be the last chance they have to get ag policy right. We are not asking for subsidies for the livestock side. We want to be able to compete in our own market. We want first chance at feeding our own people. We want a government that is as proud of what rural America produces as the men and women who care for their livestock in these miserable winter conditions are. It seems dystopian that American ag producers are at the place where we are begging for that opportunity, on our own soil. It is time to start being localists instead of globalists.
Until next week, this is John Block reporting from Washington, D.C. If you would like to review my radio shows going back more than 20 years, just go on-line to www.johnblockreports.com.
