Deere has been recently showing off it’s concept electric tractor, with the rather awkward and unfortunate name “Sustainable Energy Supply for Agricultural Machinery”, or SESAM. Deere is supposedly going to show it off at the Paris Agribusiness Show in Feb.
While it sounds interesting, whether or not it will actually work in practice is something else again. I haven’t been able to find out much about it. Deer claims that it will work for about 4 hours in “normal use”, whatever that is, or can drive about 55 kilometers on the road.
Both of those claims are essentially meaningless, though. What kind of work? What kind of load was it under, if any? Under what kind of conditions? What kind of weather, temperature, etc? Can I use it to plow snow when it’s -10 or do the batteries turn into mush at low temperatures? Or high temps? How well does it work at 100 or 110 degrees?
The statistics given out that I’ve found don’t sound utterly horrible. It recharges in about 3 hours, which is pretty good. I imagine that would require a specialized charging station, however. Almost no normal domestic power source could charge a big battery pack, that fast.
The battery’s life is estimated at 2,100 charge cycles, which also sounds pretty good until you remember that the average tractor isn’t kept for just a couple of years, but often for decades. That battery isn’t going to last for the life of the tractor, not even close. It would probably have to be replaced many times. So what is that going to cost?
The 3 hour run time may seem pretty good as well, but something like that would be almost useless for the average farm where a tractor may be expected to operate 10, 16 hours straight during busy times.
And once you’re out in the field and the battery gets low, how do you recharge it? You’d have to take it back to the shop, which could be miles away, wait 3 hours to charge it…
Basically it means you would have to have multiple tractors to fill the same role that was performed by a single machine if you’re going to keep going during busy times.
It might be useful for utility tractors used around the farm itself and that never wander far from a charger, but for harvesting, plowing, tilling… At this stage of the game they’d be useless.
I’m not saying electric tractors are useless. But they are going to need to be better than this. The technology will almost certainly improve with time, but it’s going to take better battery technologies and charging systems that we have today.
We are not planting eggplant. They were so ridiculously prolific we can’t even look at another one for a while.
Okay, what in the world is wrong with GF? It’s the middle of December, the temperature at 6 AM as I write this is about -3 degrees, and by Sunday night we’re supposed to have another 18 inches of snow, and I’m talking about gardening? Ridiculous.
But no, it’s not ridiculous really. This actually is the time when you should be starting, even if you’re here in the Great White North in Northeastern Wisconsin. This is when the planning and preparation for spring really begins, or should. And that’s what we’ve been doing – thinking, planning, looking for deals, etc.
Starting in late fall I begin keeping an eye out for bargains in stores when I’m shopping. A lot of department stores have bargain bin areas where they put heavily discounted items they’re trying to dump to make room for new stock, and you can pick up all kind of goodies, often at steep discounts.
Beginning in late fall and early winter we keep an eye out for deep discounts on things like canning supplies in the bargain bin areas of department stores. Once the prime canning season is over in the fall, a lot of department stores are eager to clear out their stock so they don’t have it taking up storage space and you can find some good deals. Things like pressure canners, waterbath canners, etc. take up a lot of storage space, aren’t hot sellers to begin with, so some places try to clear them out in late fall or early winter. Same with other home canning and processing equipment; funnels, strainers, cheesecloth, etc. We’re pretty well set up with equipment, but we still keep an eye out for good deals.
After the spring rush, you can get huge discounts on seeds, often cents on the dollar in some cases. There’s nothing wrong with picking up left over seeds at the garden center or department store if you get them cheaply enough. Yes, there is a chance there may poorer germination rate with older seeds, but most seed will survive for years if stored properly. When we cleaned out my mother’s house we found packets of seed that must have been 20 – 40 years old and while some didn’t sprout and there was a poor rate of sprouting, well, it was free seed and a lot of it did come up. It’s going to depend on the plant and how well they were stored. Some seeds require specific conditions for storage. Google can be your friend in cases like that. Most seeds will keep quite nicely in a relatively cool, dark place if kept dry, but some may have specific requirements for proper storage. Doesn’t hurt to look.
Anyone who does home canning can tell you that canning jars can get expensive. But if you buy at the end of the canning season in late fall or early winter, you can find some excellent deals there as well. We also tend to watch thrift shops like St. Vinnie’s and those kinds of places. But if you buy used jars, be careful. Check them carefully for nicks, chips, etc. Especially around the neck and mouth of the jar. If there is any damage at all to the neck and mouth of a jar, throw it away. And when buying used jars I stick with brand names like Kerr and Ball. The tomato crop was so good this past year that we ended up using almost every jar we had except for the tiny jelly jars. The ones we seem to use the most are pint jars. They’re ideal for things like soup, chili sauce, etc. I’d picked up a couple of cases on a sale about four years ago that we still had on the shelf and we even used up all of those this year. So I’m looking for pint jars now.
(And do I really need to tell you to never, never use peanut butter, mayonnaise, or other jars that came from commercial products you picked up in the grocery store? Even if you can find lids that fit them, those jars were made as cheaply as possible, were intended for a single use only, and there is no guarantee they will survive use in a home canner. Do you really want to risk your health and safety to save a few bucks on canning jars? I don’t.)
This is also the time we do some planning. I sit down with a notepad and think about the season that just ended. What plants worked well? What plants worked poorly? Was there anything you especially liked or didn’t like? Write everything down. (Keeping a notebook just for the garden is a good idea.)
Our eggplant was absolutely spectacular this past season, for example. They were ridiculously prolific. But we quickly found out we don’t like eggplant all that much, and by the end of the season, we were so sick of the stuff we couldn’t even look at them. So no eggplant. Using that space for more tomato plants is a better idea.
Speaking of tomatoes, we had about a dozen plants in the garden at the end of the garage and they didn’t do very well at all. They were spindly, produced badly, died off early. We hauled a ton of compost in there at the end of the season and that should help, but we aren’t going to be putting tomatoes in there. We know from past experience that leafy greens do pretty well there, so we’ll probably use some of that area for various lettuce in addition to the small stump(1) garden.
The herb garden — I’m not sure what we’re going to do with that to be honest. It’s in a corner where the new addition is attached to the main house, facing south-west. It’s an ideal spot, gets lots of sun, very well sheltered, and has, alas, some of the poorest soil I’ve ever seen. We have a well established area of chives that I don’t want to disturb. We also have an Italian parsley clump that’s ridiculously prolific in there, and we don’t want to mess with that either. But the majority of the area…
We made the mistake of putting oregano in there, and it immediately went absolutely nuts, taking over everything. It even jumped out into the surrounding lawn. And while it makes mowing the lawn back there smell amazing, we would much rather have the oregano go away. One year we dug the entire thing up, down to a depth of six inches, hauling the dreaded oregano down to the compost pile, filled it up with compost and put in strawberries. And within two years, the damned oregano was back… Sigh. My wife put in cone flowers at one end, and those managed to do pretty good against the oregano. But I’d rather be using the space for something edible.
Planning what to put where needs some careful planning. And sometimes you have to admit that something just isn’t working, dig it all up and try again. We did that with the front of the house. We’d inherited some utterly miserable bushes and horrible lawn from the previous owner. The bushes were invasive, required constant trimming and weren’t all that good looking. The only good thing was a ridiculously prolific and beautifully scented rose, which we loved. But the rest of it was just nasty. We left it for a long time because we loved that rose, but finally we gave up. We pulled everything out, went in with a 6 foot rotary tiller and a tractor and ground everything that was left into dust, and started from scratch. We got rid of the grass completely and turned the whole area into a hosta garden and we’re rather pleased with that. So sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, plow everything up and start over.
I think that’s what we’re going to eventually do with the herb garden. I don’t want to give up the parsley or chives, but they’re a fairly small percentage of the whole area and the rest is horrible.
I was going to try an experiment this year. I picked up a couple of really nice yellow roses that I put in containers in the front of the house over the summer and they did beautifully, even though they were in shade most of the day. I was going to try bringing them in and putting them in the living room and seeing if I could keep them going during the winter. If it worked, good. If not I was only out a few bucks for a couple of plants.
Alas, Mrs GF decided enough was enough. The living room already looks more like a greenhouse than a living room, she declared. And I have to admit she has a point. From where I’m sitting now in the kitchen I can see about fifteen different plants in various planters and groupings in the living room, including a bloody great evergreen tree of some kind that we have to keep cutting back every couple of years because it’s decided it likes the living room just fine, thank you. I made a rolling frame for it a few years ago so we could move it around because trying to shift a four foot wide, five foot tall tree is a pain in the neck. During the summer it lives out on the deck and in the fall we roll it back in. It doesn’t care where it is, just keeps growing…
Anyway, enough was enough, she said, so the roses went to live in the basement where, she says, they’ll go dormant and come back in the spring.
Ah, the stump garden… When we bought this place about 20 years ago there was a big old tree stump back there. We didn’t want to go to the expense of having someone grind it off, didn’t want to go through the work of trying to dig the thing out, so we built a retaining wall around it, filled it with dirt and compost and planted strawberries over the top. The stump completely disintegrated within four or five years, and we got a lot of tasty strawberries out of it. We kept it, occasionally planting flowers, but also using it for onions and lettuce which seem to do pretty well there.
Water is an increasingly precious commodity across the country, and lack of water has become an extremely serious issue in Southern California where a years long drought continues. I ran across this item over at Ag Professional’s website and while brief and far from in depth, it does talk a bit about the problems that are going on and the changes that are starting to take place. California Drought is a U.S. Problem | Ag Professional
The ongoing drought in California is driving a lot of farmers over there into bankruptcy and causing others serious problems as they scramble to fight with cities and other users over an increasingly scarce resource. During his campaign Donald Trump claimed that there is no real drought in California and the other south western states, and he could bring the water shortage to an end if he was elected. But no, Trump is not going to end the drought by simply claiming it doesn’t exist. Even if the new administration changes or repeals existing water regulations, it doesn’t do you much good when there isn’t any water to begin with, which is the situation southern California and Nevada are facing.
With ground water being pumped out of aquifers at rates so high it’s causing the ground to sink, that wells are drying up wells all over that part of the state, and with surface water already being rationed, simply declaring there is no drought and blaming it on regulations is ridiculous. Sooner or later those aquifers are going to be completely depleted or drawn down so far that it is no longer possible to drill deep enough and build pumping systems powerful enough to deal with it.
Are there things that could be done to improve access to water? Sure. But it would take tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure, new dams, new aqueducts, new pumping systems, etc. And even then they’d have to steal water from other parts of the country, suck rivers dry and pretty much ruin every river system they tap into in order to do it. From an engineering standpoint it could be done, but economically and politically? No state is going to stand by idly and allow it’s water be siphoned off to irrigate crops, water lawns and golf courses and fill swimming pools in states like California and Nevada.
Could the situation out there be solved some other way? Sure. But it would require change. And people don’t like change. The agricultural industry would have to fundamentally change how it works. Not just changing how they farm, but what they farm. Water intensive crops that require irrigation would have to go. Some types of agriculture, like dairy, would probably have to move elsewhere entirely. Consumers would have to get used to the idea of not having “fresh” produce of certain types available every month of the year. It would require a lot of changes that a lot of people don’t want.
And it isn’t just in California and the other states in the south west. How we use water, how we manage our water resources, is going to have to change. The changes are coming whether people like it or not.
We have reached a point in society where most of our news sources aren’t really news sources. The vast majority of websites you see out there that claim they are ‘news organizations’ are really no such thing. They have no actual reporters. They have no real journalists. They have no research staff. The have no fact checkers. They are – well, I suppose you could call them regurgitators.
If you browse through some of these ‘news’ sites, you’ll quickly find they have absolutely nothing that is actually new or original. What you’ll see is an endless string of references to material that does not originate with the site, but outside sources from traditional newspapers, magazines, and television/cable media, or even sources that have absolutely zero credibility like some wanna-be pundit on Twitter or Facebook.
What they do isn’t journalism, it’s – oh, harvesting, I suppose you could call it. They scrounge the internet for news items, studies, blogs, photos, twitter feeds, facebook posts, etc. for stories that they think will feed into the mindset of their readers, gulp them down, and then like mommy birds regurgitating food for their young, scurry back to their own website and puke it back out again, along with a liberal dose of outraged commentary, to feed their readers.
I’m sorry if that’s a bit disgusting, but that’s pretty much exactly what they do; they scarf down real news stories, digest them a bit, add some digestive juices to blur things, and then regurgitate it for us. Not in it’s original form, but twisted, half dissolved, semi-digested, warped, changed, all to suit the point of view of the website’s backers and to lure the ranks of the outraged and irritated so the website can push its political agenda or moral stance and, even more importantly, generate that yummy, yummy advertising revenue.
Now I make no attempt to hide the fact that I lean towards the left side of the political spectrum, but even I have to admit that while the regurgitators fall pretty evenly on both sides of the spectrum, a lot of the left leaning sites are doing this. If you go to sites like Right Wing Watch or Raw Story, what you’ll find there is an endless string of “stories” that are nothing but regurgitated information from other sources, all selected to support and feed the anger and outrage of us lefties, along with large doses of comments by bloggers that support our feelings. If you switch over to the far right, you’ll find exactly the same thing going on.
I did a totally unscientific (and quick because I get bored easily) study and almost all of the “news” websites I have encountered are either entirely or mostly little more than regurgitators of other people’s work.
A lot of very popular sites do this. Joe My God, Right Wing Watch, TruthOut. Raw Story, for example. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of actual original journalism over there. Their “reporters” scrounge the net for little tidbits, give us a couple of sentences describing it, and then utter their ‘oh my god isn’t this horrible we’re all going to hell’ commentary. It’s the same over on the right, even worse, I suppose. Mother Jones and Grist occasionally will publish something I’d call ‘original reporting’, but for the most part their websites are little more than regurgitators.
I find this ethically troubling, to be honest. A lot of these sites are entirely based on the work of other people, other organizations. They blatantly scoop it up and regurgitate it for their own readers. They generally give credit to the original, true, but still, they’re taking advantage of someone else’s work and contribute absolutely nothing except a bit of anger and outrage.
I suppose I’ve been guilty of this too. I’ve certainly used news stories I’ve read as a starting point for things I’ve written here, but I like to think that at least I’ve used that material only as a way of introducing something original.
It’s interesting to see how things change over the years. Once upon a time oats was a major crop here in Wisconsin. Almost every farmer grew it as part of their crop rotation program. It’s fairly easy to grow. Most of the grain went for cattle feed, with the stalks making an excellent bedding for cattle. We used it as a cover crop as well when we planted alfalfa. Alfalfa takes quite a while to get established, so oats were planted with it. The oats grew much faster, provided a cover crop for the new alfalfa plus we’d get a fairly decent crop of oats by the end of the summer. We grew it for both cattle feed and as a seed crop.
Almost no one grows it around here now any more. If they plant small grain at all, it’s always winter wheat here. Seeing a field of oats is so rare now that when we’re driving around the state in late summer and see some it’s almost a shock.
Oats has acquired a bit of a bad reputation around here. It is susceptible to a type of fungus known as rust, which can cause serious yield losses and adversely effect the quality of the grain. During a “normal” summer it wasn’t a big problem. But it seems we don’t really have “normal” hot, dry summers any longer. While our growing season has become significantly longer up here, it has also become more humid on average.
The price of oats doesn’t help much, either. Wheat generally sells for twice as much as oats does, so there isn’t much of an incentive for farmers to keep growing it unless they are under contract to a manufacturer to produce it for food. Right now oats is selling for around $2/bushel while wheat is going for over $4. At one point earlier this fall oats was down to around $1.70.
The question I heard being asked most often during the recent election was; what the hell happened to the media? The almost universal opinion of most people seems to be that just when we needed the media the most to keep us informed, discover the truth, to keep things rational, it failed us totally.
The media blithely rolled along, repeating all of the lies, the innuendo, the misinformation, deliberately pumped up phony scandals. It gleefully turned casual comments and jokes into derogatory and misleading memes. It pounced on every conspiracy it could find. It magnified the silly and the ridiculous into clickbait headlines. It leapt upon phony stories from satirical websites or fraudulent sources gleefully and unapologetically.
Instead of helping to solve problems, the media became the problem.
But did it didn’t. Not really.
We have this impression that the news media is supposed to be some kind of watchdog, that it’s supposed to only publish the truth, that it’s supposed to call our attention to corruption, lies, misleading information, to cast light into the dark places inhabited by politicians and corporations. It is this concept that some call the fourth estate, the idea that the news media is some kind of watchdog, a guardian..
But the news media has never been that. The news media has a long and sordid history of manipulating information, spreading misinformation, taking things out of context, and doing it deliberately. The media has helped to foster conflicts and even wars, destroy reputations of innocent people, manipulating public opinion… And if you don’t believe that, just start doing some research. A few minutes running searches on Google is all it takes to discover that what is going on today is nothing new.
I know a lot of people who are laying the blame for Trump’s rise to power on the media and its failure to accurately report the facts. And there are certainly valid reasons to criticize modern media. But it isn’t anything new. The media has always done this. Either for profit, to push some political agenda by the owners of the media outlet, to pander to politicians…
But the fake news stories, quotes taken out of context, attempts by biased owners to manipulate public opinion? That’s been going on for as long as there has been a media.
And as for who is to blame, well, it’s us, really. The media is in business for one reason, for the most part: to make money. And they’ve learned that the easiest, least expensive and most profitable thing to do is publish the garbage they publish. Because we buy it. We click on the clickbait headlines, we gulp down millions of words written about ridiculous celebrities who don’t matter in the slightest. We’d rather read about who got who pregnant or who got a breast enlargement or who is divorcing who, then about things that really matter.
So if you’re looking for someone to blame, it’s not the media. It’s us.
The financial situation for a lot of farmers is pretty stressful right now. Farm income is down 42% from what it was in 2013, farm land prices are dropping and they’re predicting land prices could drop 20% or more over the next couple of years. Corn prices are less than half what they were in 2012, cattle and hog prices are down 38%. Corn and soybean inventories are going to be at the highest level in something like 30 years. The University of Illinois says many farmers in the state are going to be losing about $28 an acre on their corn, and while soybeans are still profitable, they’ll be lucky if they make $67 an acre this year compared to $229 back in 2010.
The situation isn’t good when you look at the financial data. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City is reporting a decline in the financial health of farmers. They have less working capital, are having to resort to taking out loans just to meet operating expenses. In the Midwest banks are reporting that about 22% of farmers will have a negative cash flow for 2016.
As usual the farmers who are getting hit the worst are the young ones who are just starting out or have only been in business a few years. They don’t have the land base or the credit history to get enough capital to buy equipment or to even continue operating.
Farming is a difficult business at the best of times. And it operates under financial conditions that pretty much no other business faces. How many companies would invest huge amounts of money in infrastructure, equipment, land, buildings, labor, etc. when they have absolutely no idea what their product will sell for when it finally gets to market?
That’s the situation farmers face. Farming is a long term proposition. You invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in tractors, combines, planters. You spend tens of thousands of dollars on seed. You invest huge amounts of money buying or renting land. Invest tens of thousands of dollars in labor to plant and tend to a crop.
And you have absolutely no idea what that crop is going to sell for because you have no control over the markets. You could have a boom year like we had a few years ago when the drought drove commodity prices up through the roof, or you could lose your shirt because prices on the commodities markets fell. You can make predictions, run models, listen to the experts, make educated guesses. But in the long run you’re depending on a market that has so many variables; weather, political climate, disease…
I miss farming, but I am glad I’m not doing it any more.
The whole story of Theranos is a cautionary tale that illustrates that if something is too good to be true, it probably is.
Theranos was the golden child of Silicon Valley investors. The company and it’s founder Elizabeth Holmes claimed it was going to revolutionize the medical testing industry with it’s revolutionary new testing technology. Instead of health care professionals having to draw huge vials of blood for testing, Holmes claimed their new technology could do exactly the same testing using only a couple of drops of blood from a finger prick. The company sucked up hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. The company claimed that it’s testing procedures could do almost 200 different tests in its online documentation. Walgreens jumped on the bandwagon, signing a contract with Theranos to provide medical testing, and began offering testing is dozens of it’s pharmacies.
And then it all fell apart. US regulators issued a letter stating that Theranos’ testing “pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety” and could cause “serious injury or harm or death to individuals served by the laboratory” after inspections of one of the labs turned up major problems. FDA was also beginning to scrutinize the company. The company, which had never made it’s proprietary testing technology public, said it asked a prominent research hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, to compare Theranos technology to traditional techniques to prove it worked. But the clinic in question said it hadn’t done any such work, and added that “we are not consultants”.
In May Theranos voided data from thousands of tests that had been done over the previous two years. Unfortunately long after people may have used that data to plan medical treatment based on the testing. Walgreens terminated its relationship with Theranos and shut down the testing sites it had set up in stores in Arizona.
Other troubling information began cropping up. Like the fact that Theranos had only one test that was actually approved by the FDA. It was selling its other tests through regulatory loopholes. The Wall Street Journal discovered the company wasn’t even using its own technologies for testing. It was using traditional testing equipment made by other manufacturers.
Theranos clinical labs have been shut down and those employees fired, its CEO is banned from operating laboratories for two years. The company is being investigated by prosecutors and in addition to being sued by Walgreens, it is also being sued by at least eight patients and one of its own investors is suing it for fraud.
That doesn’t seem to have bothered it’s founder, Holmes, in the slightest. Holmes is pushing yet another blood testing device the company calls a minilab, about the size of a computer. The claims for this one are more modest than for it’s original technology which they claimed could do 200 tests. This one will only do 40. The Wall Street Journal challenged that claim as well.
This is one of those situations where I don’t know where they’re getting their information because what they’re saying here isn’t what I’ve been reading in the ag news.
Dean Foods seems to be trying to claim farmgate prices are going to go up significantly, that US dairy exports are robust and growing, and that the markets are giving off “buoyant signals”.
But well, no, the market is doing no such thing, and there seems to be no indication that we’re going to be seeing any kind of significant increase in farmgate prices in the US any time soon.
While milk production in NZ and the EU is trending down a bit, here in North America it has continued to rise significantly, with significant numbers of new cattle being added to milking herds and continued increases in milk production. Texas was up about 11%, Minnesota and Wisconsin were up about 2% or a little less. Overall US production is around +1.2% to +2.3%, depending on the numbers you believe, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that’s going to stop.
As for cheese, yes, there was a blip in the cheese price last week, but that happens all the time, especially as we get closer to major holidays, and we haven’t even begun to make a dent in the truly massive amounts of cheese and butter already in storage. The USDA’s recent purchase of about $20 million in surplus cheese (if I remember the number right) didn’t even make a dent in the amount of cheese in storage. And as of this morning, cheese prices have already started to fall again, down 6 cents over the weekend.
And the statement that “foreign buyers are lapping up” US dairy products is, aside from being a horrible pun, simply not true. Exports of dairy products actually dropped 2% in September.
There is always an uptick in prices this time of year as we approach the holiday baking season. Cream, cheese and butter prices almost always begin to rise around this time of year as retailers and suppliers try to cash in on increased demand. It’s a seasonal blip that doesn’t really indicate any kind of significant improvement in the market.
Maybe Dean foods is just trying to make investors feel a bit better about the fact that Dean’s profits fell by 28% last quarter?
Agrimony is one of my favorite sites to go to for current information on the ag markets, and for good reason. They avoid hype, clickbait headlines and pretty much focus on what is actually going on. And one thing that’s going on right now is that people in the ag business are very, very nervous. You can take a look at the current situation here: Source: Agrimoney.com | ags dip, as funds succumb to pre-election nerves
The article only mentions Trump once, but he is really the elephant in the room, and he makes a whole lot of people in the ag industry very nervous indeed.
No one has been able to really pin him down on anything, really, but one thing is certain, is he has an extremely antagonistic attitude towards China. His campaign speeches and his off-the-cuff comments have portrayed China as some kind of economic super villain that has decimated the US economy. While most people understand that most of his comments are largely campaign rhetoric and could very well change 180 degrees the next time he opens his mouth, it makes a hell of a lot of people in the ag business very nervous indeed, and for good reason.
China buys massive amounts of US agricultural products, and making vague threats and uttering dire warnings about what he’d do to interfere with China’s business interests, is a very dangerous thing to do when China could easily put barriers in place to restrict the importation of US farm products.
Has China damaged our economy? Probably. But it was done with the full cooperation of the US companies who gleefully started snapping up Chinese products instead of making them here because it was more profitable. And with the full cooperation of the US government which did little or nothing to try to stop it.
But that point is moot right now. It’s already happened. Pointing fingers and uttering vague threats isn’t going to do anyone much good at this point in time. And it could make things far worse. If Trump gets elected and continues to try to use China as a scapegoat for our own largely self created economic problems, the end result could be very nasty indeed.
Like it or not, we are in a world wide economy. US ag exports are a relatively bright spot in what is an otherwise overall mediocre or even worrisome economy. If Trump becomes elected and continues his blustering, threatening attitude, China could simply take its business elsewhere.
grouchyfarmer 