While America's farmers are aging--and potentially more at risk from COVID-19--the new federal relief bill includes "much as $23.5 billion in assistance" for them. Moreover, existing policies at the USDA will ensure that the heirs of our hard working farmers will be able to collect those payments.
In Friday's New York Times, Eric Lipton and Sharon LaFraniere reported in For Farmers, Stimulus Bill Means Subsidies Continue to Flow:
After providing nearly $26 billion in aid to farmers over the past few years to offset losses from President Trump’s trade war with China, the administration now has another giant new pot of money to pass out to them with little or no oversight, courtesy of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package.
The legislation, given final passage by the House on Friday and quickly signed into law by Mr. Trump, allocates as much as $23.5 billion in assistance for farmers and gives broad leeway to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to direct it where he sees fit.
The money was inserted into the bill by senators from farm states after an intense lobbying push by major corporate farming groups. Parts of the industry are suffering immediate hits from the coronavirus outbreak, such as corn growers who have seen prices for ethanol plummet and mom-and-pop suppliers of farm markets that have closed in many cities.
But unlike industries such as airlines, hotels and automakers, which have largely or completely shut down, most farms are still operating. And sales of some products in the industry have surged as worried consumers stock up, generating shortages of meat, chicken, eggs and flour. . . .
Farmers in Midwestern states like Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota — as well as in Texas and Kansas — reaped much of the $26 billion spent in the past two years to blunt the economic effect of the administration’s trade policies, according to Joseph W. Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Without those payments, net farm income last year would have dropped about 5 percent, he estimated. Instead, it rose nearly 12 percent.
Seth Meyer, an agricultural economist with the University of Missouri, said the economic blow to agriculture from the virus could be harder to offset than the lost sales from trade policy.
“If you are producing flowers and there is no wedding this summer, if you were a fruit and vegetable grower selling through a restaurant wholesaler, what do you do now?” he asked. “What if you are a milk producer selling your product to a processor who has trouble organizing transportation and labor?”
The bottom line, he said, could be a bigger effect on farmers than that created by the trade friction with China — “much bigger, potentially.”
Still, some parts of the industry are seeing benefits from the pandemic. Some big meat producers, including Tyson Foods, announced special bonuses this week for farmers to reward them for the increase in work to keep supermarket shelves stocked.
In general, farmers have weathered recessions better than other economic groups, because while consumers cut purchases of goods like clothing and change their eating habits to save money, they always need food. This downturn is fundamentally different from others in many ways, but Wall Street analysts are issuing bullish predictions for parts of the agriculture industry based on the surge in demand for products like beef and chicken.
“Meat is flying off the shelves” wrote Ken Goldman, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who upgraded the stocks of Tyson and Sanderson Farms, two major chicken and meat producers. “We now believe that outstanding retail demand for meat is more than offsetting soft demand at food service.”
Prices being paid to farmers raising cattle and other animals have dropped in recent weeks, reflecting declines in financial markets worldwide and disruptions in supply chains, although these prices recovered somewhat this week.
Should farmers die in the pandemic, a source pointed out to Bluestem that their "representatives" will still be able to collect farm subsidy payments, though voting for president on the part of the deceased will be out of the question.
A rural landowner recently shared a message from the Farm Services Administration, an agency that's part of the United States Department of Agriculture. Apparently, if ag producers do their bit and die for the future economy in the pandemic, they'll still get their farm payments.
The text:
Payments to Deceased Producers In order to claim a Farm Service Agency (FSA) payment on behalf of a deceased producer, all program conditions for the payment must have been met before the applicable producer’s date of death.
If a producer earned a FSA payment prior to his or her death, the following is the order of precedence for the representatives of the producer:
administrator or executor of the estate
the surviving spouse
surviving sons and daughters, including adopted children
surviving father and mother
surviving brothers and sisters
heirs of the deceased person who would be entitled to payment according to the State lawIn order for FSA to release the payment, the legal representative of the deceased producer must file a form FSA-325, to claim the payment for themselves or an estate. The county office will verify and determine that the application, contract, loan agreement, or other similar form requesting payment issuance, was signed by the applicable deadline for such form, by the deceased or a person legally authorized to act on their behalf at that time of application.
If the application, contract or loan agreement form was signed by someone other than the participant who is deceased, FSA will determine whether the person submitting the form has the legal authority to submit the form to compel FSA to pay the deceased participant.
Payments will be issued to the respective representative’s name using the deceased program participant’s tax identification number. Payments made to representatives are subject to offset regulations for debts owed by the deceased.
FSA is not responsible for advising persons in obtaining legal advice on how to obtain program benefits that may be due to a participant who has died, disappeared or who has been declared incompetent.
As Chuck Abbott noted in 2019's On average, U.S. farmers are aging, but a quarter of them are newcomers:
One-third of America’s 3.4 million farmers are over the age of 65, long regarded as retirement age, and nearly a million more of them are within a decade of that milestone, according to new USDA data. For decades, the aging U.S. farmer has been a cause for concern, expressed in this question: Who will feed America in the future? Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue saw encouraging news in the Census of Agriculture, which was released on Thursday.
Some 27 percent of farmers are categorized as new and beginning producers, with 10 years or less of experience in agriculture. Perdue said he was “pleasantly surprised” to see the figure. “That means a number of young people are coming back to the farm.” . . .
For four decades, the average age of farmers has been on the rise. It was 50.3 years for the “principal operator” in the 1978 census, 53.3 years in 1992, 57.1 years in 2007, 58.3 years in 2012, and now is 59.4 years. By contrast, the average age of new and beginning farmers is 46.3 years, says the 2017 census. Their farms “tend to be smaller than average in both acres and value of production,” said the USDA. The average farm for new and beginning producers is 120 acres smaller than the U.S. average farm size of 441 acres.
Young producers — age 35 or younger — account for 9 percent of farmers, but their operations and production are larger than the U.S. average.
When Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick suggested that Older people would rather die than let Covid-19 harm US economy, we were repulsed, as were our Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate neighbors here on the Lake Traverse Reservation, though the SWO chair did reflect in the tribal paper that the Dakota people had persisted during other deadly epidemics.
The Guardian reported:
At the White House’s coronavirus briefing Monday night, the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx, said that emerging data from Europe suggested that 99% of the coronavirus deaths were people over age 50, and that many had pre-existing conditions. That “doesn’t change the need to protect the elderly”, Birx said.
Here in the Upper Midwest, that age cohort includes many working farmers. While we're happy their heirs can collect the farm program dollars owed to them should they perish, we wish them all good health and hope that their children have adopted the common-sense behavior several of our 70-plus year old readers in rural Minnesota are enjoying. Their kids think the greatest boon to family and wealth is to have the elders around as long as possible, so they asked them to stay at home, even before Governor Walz ordered the entire state to stay home.
Stay healthy, dear readers of all ages, and wash your hands. We're all in this together and it's up to us to make sure as many of us as possible stay in it.
Photo: Ruins of an old creamery. Day County, South Dakota.At least, we guessed that it was a creamery. Photo by Sally Jo Sorensen.
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