Biden's Battle with Agriculture: Navigating the Fields of Change
Exploring The Impact And Challenges Of Agriculture Changes In The Biden Era
I’ve done some pretty out-of-the-box things in order to stretch my family's salary. I scour the grocery store advertisements, looking for sales that week on things we need. I am researching local farms nearby to buy meat from. I drove 20 minutes from my house to buy microwaveable meals from the Stouffers factory to put in our deep freezer. The constant research and effort made towards grocery shopping makes me feel as though I’m on an episode of Extreme Couponing.
And no, I’m not imagining things. According to the USDA, Food prices rose 3.5% in 2020, 3.5% in 2021, 10.6% in 2022, and another 2.9% in 2023. That means that just a few years ago, food was on average, 20% cheaper than it is now, with some estimates as high as 25%.
And I haven’t even told you the best part: the USDA is predicting food prices will rise even more in the year 2024, with some products like beef continuing to rise.
What is causing the sharp rise in food prices?
Well, yet another outbreak of bird flu caused chicken and egg prices to climb completely out of control. Drought across the entire United States severely impacted crops in 2022. And while those two things are not Biden's fault, the war in Ukraine alone, which arguably was caused by Biden when he lifted sanctions from the Nordstream 2 pipeline, caused the price of wheat to increase by 110%, and corn by 140%.
And rather than trying to solve these problems, especially the War in Ukraine, Biden has been spending his time attacking American Farmers.
Family farming produces 85% of the USA’s food, yet Biden's proposed tax reform agenda eliminates “step up to basis”. This crucial policy helps protect the family farm from accruing massive capital gains taxes when the farmer passes his farm to the next of kin. Since farmland has increased in value by upwards of 300%, it would make the taxes almost impossible to pay if his proposals were implemented. To make matters worse our government is allowing China to buy our farmland, making farming yet another American job threatened with Chinese takeover.
The Biden administration's EPA passed a ridiculous water usage bill that essentially punished farmers and added more red tape and paperwork for them to simply do their job. Under this bill, 97% of Iowa's farmland was under the auspices of the Federal Government, and farmers would need to obtain costly permits to simply plow their land, build fences, and move dirt. You know, things that farmers do each and every day would now require permits. Not a single farmer was consulted about how this ruling would impact them.
What’s more, the original WOTUS rule also negatively impacted the conservation efforts of wetlands in the State of Iowa. After an unfavorable ruling by the US Supreme Court, in August 2023, the EPA only revised a small portion of their ruling but kept the rest, and ignored farmers' concerns once again.
Finally, his war on fossil fuels such as Natural Gas and Diesel have been devastating, as tractors and farm equipment rely on diesel, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is made from Natural Gas, which explains why fertilizer prices doubled for the year 2021.
His war on farming makes sense when you realize that farming accounted for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2021. As far back as 2019 he vowed to “end fossil fuels”. However, there are over 6,000 products produced using fossil fuels, and synthetic fertilizer is one we simply cannot live without. You can create some fertilizer naturally with animal poop, but unless we cut the entire world's population by 3.5 billion, we will never return to a time period where we don’t need synthetic fertilizer to produce enough food to feed people.
The last thing we need is for our President to control how much fertilizer our farmers are using via “Precision Agriculture” or to make importing fertilizer harder to do. But that hasn’t stopped Biden from trying!
The President of Sri Lanka already tried to control his nation's farmers when he outright banned synthetic fertilizer, causing a nationwide famine. His Presidency ended with him escaping his own country via helicopter. We don’t need to repeat his mistakes here in America.
Yet Biden seems to think that American Farmers have amnesia about all the hurt he has been attempting to cause, as he began a tour of America's farmland right before the 2024 election season to sweet talk the very people whose livelihoods he’s been trying to destroy. And as Biden interferes with farming, he’s actively interfering with my family's grocery budget.
Things were so bad that in November 2022, for the first time in this Nation’s history, America, the country of “Amber waves of grain” and “sea to shining sea”, a country that has farms that you can see from satellites in space, was importing more food than it was exporting, causing a trade deficit.
Crop circles in Kansas
And Biden, in the face of this destruction of trade, instead of treating our farmers as the educated professionals and partners in conservation efforts that they are, has his heart set on interfering with their vital work as much as possible to appease climate extremists.
This is not incompetence, this is a man who wants to destroy the farming industry so he can say to his buddies at the UN “Look I reduced our Country’s greenhouse gasses by forcing everyone to stop eating meat by reducing meat production.” This is deliberate.
As an American, this isn’t just a “farmers” problem. This is all of our problems. As food prices continue to climb faster than wages, all of us run a very real risk of being unable to feed our families.
And I’m not going down without a fight. This November I’m voting for the candidate who puts America’s Needs First. My family cannot afford four more years of Joe Biden.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.