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unidentified
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Most Democratic senators have been voting against it, calling for expiring health care tax credits to be extended. | |
| Lawmakers will also vote on legislation by Democrats to end the Brazil, Canada, and global tariffs declared by President Trump. | ||
| Watch live coverage of the House on C-SPAN. | ||
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| And all of our congressional coverage is available on our free video app, C-SPAN Now, and our website at c-span.org. | ||
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| Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
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| Joining us now to discuss the impact Trump administration policies and the government shutdown are having on the U.S. agriculture industry is PJ Hufstetter. | ||
| She is a agricultural commodities and farm economy reporter for Reuters. | ||
| PJ, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you for having me. | |
| We appreciate you being with us this morning. | ||
| We'll start with issues related to the government shutdown. | ||
| We are now in day 25 of the shutdown, and this week about half of U.S. states warned that SNAP and WIC benefits may not be issued next month. | ||
| Food benefits aren't typically impacted when we see funding lapses like government shutdowns. | ||
| What's happening this time? | ||
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unidentified
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France this time is that as we reported, actually my coworker at our DC office, Leah Douglas, actually reported yesterday that USDA is saying that it is not going to be using contingency funds to be able to cover food aid benefits if in fact the government continues to shut down past November 1. | |
| And all of this is happening at a time when food banks and a lot of food assistance programs had already been struggling with funding cuts from earlier this year as part of President Trump's efforts to be able to shrink the size of the government. | ||
| And at the same time, we are also facing multi-year rises in hunger in the U.S. | ||
| A lot of this is coming out of COVID, but also because cost of living has been rising. | ||
| So right now, there's kind of this intersection and crux that's happening between the government shutdown and enough funding to be able to keep food assistance programs going. | ||
| How many people are we looking at being impacted by this? | ||
| And I know you mentioned food banks, but what's being done to help bridge the gap in help people who are going to be affected? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, it's, you know, the issue is, so for SNAP benefits in the United States, it's more than 41 million Americans. | |
| You're also talking about the shutdown is threatening the nearly 7 million participants in a program called WIC or the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. | ||
| A lot of this is, I mean, this is funding that is tied in, you know, through the government that end up getting passed through to different states in order to be able to feed folks. | ||
| A lot of people have misconceptions of like who is actually receiving these funds. | ||
| And one of the largest growing populations is, in fact, people who are working, people who have one job or two jobs, but the jobs that they have don't make enough to be able to cover all of their expenses, including food. | ||
| The shutdown also impacting the Department of Agriculture itself. | ||
| It has paused non-mandatory data collection. | ||
| That may not seem like a big deal, but explain what it is, what data is collected, who uses it for what, and explain to people why it's important. | ||
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unidentified
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So it is, at least in our world in the ag and commodity world, USDA is known as really kind of the global gold standard when it comes to gathering data and information about a whole host of issues related to food, whether it is reports dealing with the number of people who are hungry in the United States to the volume of exports of soybeans and how many metric tons are being exported to which countries. | |
| A lot of this information is used both by Congress to be able to figure out how much they need to be able to spend on support programs, whether it's subsidies and supports for farmers or funding for different educational programs dealing with food or agriculture, or how much money to be able to spend with regards to supporting food assistance, | ||
| and whether that's church pantries or that is large food banks. | ||
| It also ends up impacting a lot of the commodity markets. | ||
| So the futures markets of soybeans, corn, wheat, livestock, things like that. | ||
| And how that actually ripples down is changes in the futures market have a direct impact on what's known as the cash market or what farmers themselves can go ahead and sell their crops for, whether it's their soybeans or their wheat or their cattle going to a cash market. | ||
| But it's not just even commodities, right? | ||
| So the U.S. Department of Agriculture gathers all sorts of information about what are known as specialty crops, delicious treats that we all eat, such as cherries and apples, seafood, fish. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of everything. | ||
| They are just the hub of information. | ||
| So it tracks so much. | ||
| And frankly, food is a fundamental element like everybody eats. | ||
| And so that information and that data is intertwined in so much of American society and even beyond. | ||
| Our guest, PJ Hefsteder, she is an agriculture commodities and farm economy reporter for Reuters. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can give us a call the lines Republicans 202-748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you are an agricultural worker, there's a special line for you. | ||
| You can give us a call at 202-748-8003. | ||
| And PJ, we have that line set aside for agricultural workers. | ||
| We did hear from one earlier today, a soybean farmer in Ohio. | ||
| That's something that you've mentioned a couple times. | ||
| China has historically been the largest purchaser of U.S. soybeans, but they have stopped. | ||
| Explain why. | ||
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unidentified
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They have stopped importing U.S. soybeans completely. | |
| They are by far the world's largest importer of soybeans. | ||
| And from our reporting, both in myself and our Chicago commodities team, as well as our commodity reporters that are in Asia and as well as Europe, what our sources are telling us is that that decision to do so is in direct response to the current trade tensions that have been going on between Washington as well as Beijing. | ||
| You have to understand that a lot of the trade policies that are in place right now and that are expanding under the current president's administration, it really started under President Trump's first term and then pretty much were held in, for the most part, were held in place by the Biden administration with some exception and then have expanded now. | ||
| So last year, China bought 45% of all U.S. soybean exports. | ||
| So the question has been, how exactly, like how exactly is the U.S. going to make that up? | ||
| And who is buying? | ||
| So the USDA data blackout with the government shutdown is leaving a lot of people kind of scrambling in the dark to try to figure out what is actually happening. | ||
| Now, I will say that we look at all of these trends all the time for export patterns. | ||
| And what you have to understand is that the most recent data from U.S. customs data only goes through July. | ||
| And soybean exports to China were already down at that point 51%. | ||
| Mexico was the next number two importer, and that was down 11%. | ||
| And Indonesia was down 32%. | ||
| So the biggest question right now in a lot of both traders as well as farmers who right now, many of them have harvested their soybeans and are just storing them is how, like, where are soybeans going to go? | ||
| A certain amount obviously is going to be used in the domestic market, but they need export markets in order to be able to maintain prices that make it so that they can actually pay their bills and be in the black. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Ricardo, who's calling from Texas on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ricardo. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning, Tammy. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I hope you're doing fine. | ||
| And thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Thank you for the guest in advance for answering some of my questions. | ||
| It has to do with the fact that I believe that we're a republic and we used to, I believe, like teach righteousness to other nations because as a group, like a republic, we're like one body, indivisible, right? | ||
| And if we will produce cotton and soybeans or whatever as a nation, we would export it to another nation and we would say, wait, the payments come in here to this channel, so this pipelines that go straight into the treasury, and then those funds were used to educate and continue to cultivate the people and the nation, right? | ||
| And maybe the tariffs, a new deal is like a new covenant, and maybe raising the tariffs high to bring people to the table so that they could make a new deal. | ||
| Does this have to do with like maybe now channeling the funds away from the treasury from the common commonwealth and into some different channels? | ||
| And what exactly is going on? | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| So just to clarify, you're asking about kind of the flow of the tariff funds and kind of where they're going. | ||
| It sounded like that's what he was asking. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Well, you know, what we focus on in our reporting team is mostly on what's happening with regards to tariffs that are impacting and being charged on the goods that are being exported or on consumer goods that are being either imported or the ripple effects on what's happening here. | ||
| So I will say this. | ||
| The tariffs, The trade policies and tariffs have been increasing costs for farmers on imports for things like fertilizer and machinery, as well as obviously it's been raising consumer prices for some goods. | ||
| The flow of, you know, the flow of those funds and where that would go to impact either, you know, consumer, you know, for consumer goods and for farmers, that is an area that, you know, our team doesn't necessarily cover. | ||
| And PJ, related to that, this was a tweet or a post on X by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rowlands earlier this week. | ||
| It says, while Democrats play politics, POTIS is standing up for our farmers. | ||
| This Thursday, USDA will resume farm service agency core operations, including critical services for farm loan processing, ARC/slash PLC payments, and other programs, over $3 billion in assistance farmers have counted on in business planning on in their business planning decisions. | ||
| Explain what we know about these loans. | ||
| What are they used for? | ||
| Who will receive them? | ||
| And how are they going to help those impacted by tariff policy and the shutdown? | ||
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unidentified
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So the shutdown of the FSA or what are known as the USDA's field offices, the Farm Service Agency manages a lot of programs that directly impact farmers. | |
| They also have a slew of government loans, whether they're direct loans, meaning the government is actually directly loaning money to a farmer, or they're what's known as a guaranteed loan, where a farmer will go to a banker. | ||
| The bank thinks that the farmer is too high of a risk, and then will go to the federal government. | ||
| And the federal government will guarantee that loan, meaning that if the farmer fails or files for bankruptcy, the bank is going to be made whole. | ||
| A lot of these folks who are getting these loans, they do tend to be younger farmers. | ||
| They do tend to be more at-risk farmers. | ||
| These are people who are growing crops or raising livestock that may not own a lot of land. | ||
| They may not be the biggest farms, right? | ||
| And that they need the help. | ||
| It tends to be a very, you know, in the past, it has in other, under different administrations, it's tended to be a very successful program. | ||
| When the government shut down, a lot of those, you know, the government shut down in the height of harvest season, and it came to a screeching halt for processing a lot of those loan programs. | ||
| So the reopening of the offices is going to be a boon for farmers who are trying, you know, desperately to be able to get the loan paperwork shoved through so that they can get the money to be able to pay their bills, you know, whether it's pre-paying for seeds or fertilizer chemicals, you know, paying for the rent that's due to their landlord, things like that. | ||
| One of the things that a lot of people don't understand in the loan program is that lenders, whether they're banks or the farm credit system or other creditors, they'll actually use those government, you know, so the emergency payments they're talking about or the additional payments of the $3 billion from USDA. | ||
| A lot of times in the loan documents, what it'll say is that any either indemnities from the government or any of these subsidy payments, that's actually collateral, meaning that it doesn't actually directly go to the farmer itself, himself or herself. | ||
| It will actually go directly to or will pass through the farmer and go to make the bank or a creditor whole. | ||
| So having those office, you know, the offices reopen is definitely a good thing for farmers right now. | ||
| It's also something that's really important because what happens is, particularly for like cattle operators, cattle guys will go and sell their cattle at what's known as a cash barn, right? | ||
| Big barn, cattle go in, they get sold. | ||
| But the problem is, if a farmer has a loan with the federal government, they actually can't cash the check for selling their cattle. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the government is actually also on the check and has to sign off in order to be able to have the check clear. | ||
| So for weeks, there's been cattle guys and women who have been trying to be able to cash checks for cattle that have been sold, and they're just kind of stuck. | ||
| We will talk more about cattle here in just a few minutes, but I wanted to bring Joe in. | ||
| He's calling from Seebeck, Washington, on the line for independence. | ||
| Hi, Joe. | ||
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unidentified
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Hi. | |
| Some of my questions were answered in the last comment she made. | ||
| So do you, or does Reuters or yourself, do you guys keep statistics on the smaller green farmers who may go to FSA, but most of the time they're just kind of working out of pocket and locally? | ||
| So do you keep the statistical records of the loans and crop yields and so on that we could look at and refer to as a resource? | ||
| Are you talking about like what we would call like a specialty crop? | ||
| So like a lettuce farmer or like a vegetable farmer, like a fruit farmer, things like that. | ||
| Or are you talking about a farm that does more like sustainable farming, organic farming? | ||
| Could you help me clarify? | ||
| Actually, both, because the crop is what we grow, as you described it, and our efforts are regenerative and sustainable in our year-round growing processes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We at Reuters live in data. | ||
| Not that we'd laugh, but we live in data. | ||
| But I will say we do, like I do track, I focus a lot on farm debt and farm lending practices. | ||
| And so I've been doing a lot of research on, you know, private debt, you know, whether it's like a seed seller or like a farmer's co-op that's issuing out a loan, right? | ||
| Organic, you know, organic practices and things like that. | ||
| USDA actually has a ton of information, all of which, of course, is frozen right now. | ||
| And a number of these reports, USDA, Secretary Rollins has told us and has told me that they are reviewing a lot of those surveys and a lot of those reports to see whether or not they're considered to still be viable or economically important enough and impactful enough to keep. | ||
| That's a big question mark going forward of how some of those smaller, you know, smaller reports and that data collection is going to be affected. | ||
| There's also a lot of data that is collected usually by state departments of agriculture that we look at and different industry groups. | ||
| You know, you start getting into questions about, you know, well, industry groups, are they, you know, are they biased and are they slanting the data to carry one narrative or not? | ||
| And that's actually been the thing that's been so, you know, why so many people look to USDA data as being important is because it's been seen as the government's data collection. | ||
| I mean, it's massive. | ||
| So I guess the answer is yes, some, but it's compiled by, you know, from drawing from a number of data resources. | ||
| Jason is on the line from Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| My question to your guest is: when you go around to these farmers, overwhelming Poaster on the reports, and maybe you can validate it, is that they vote for Republicans and these same people want handouts and they don't want it for other people. | ||
| For instance, the USAAID, I'm pretty sure they were all against, they were for eliminating that without realizing it benefits them because the food they grow goes to them. | ||
| And also, if you could touch base on the reported investment firm, they just call it AcreTrader, that the vice president has staked in to buy these same farms, distressed farms from these people. | ||
| You know, how he attested that because every time you see articles on TV, they said they'll vote for Trump third term, even though his policies are clearly hurting them, but they want the bailout that they don't want or the socialism that they don't want others to have. | ||
| Can you so those are excellent questions? | ||
| Um, so thank you for asking them. | ||
| The uh acre trader uh story, I can't comment on that right now because to be honest, I'm working working on a story about that. | ||
| Um, uh, and the idea of fractionalized land investment, um, which goes down into a rabbit hole of economic geekery that you know, this this session is not probably, you know, set up long enough to go into. | ||
| Um, but I will agree with you on this: the support for President Trump grew actually in this last election in America's top farming counties, despite all of the first the first term trade war. | ||
| So, I was digging into some of this data, um, and farming-dependent counties really have rallied behind the president. | ||
| In 2024, it was an average of nearly 78% support, which was up from the previous election of 73.1% and in 2016 and 76.1% in 2020. | ||
| So, even now, and there is definitely, particularly with the president's recent post with regards to Argentina and purchasing more beef and quadrupling the quota of beef coming in from Argentina, which was not well received online within the livestock sector, cattlemen and cattlewomen and ranchers and cow-calf operators and feedlots. | ||
| Like it did not, it did not land well. | ||
| So, but I will say this: there is, I'm seeing, you know, some stories out there about rural America turning its back on the president. | ||
| And I have to tell you, like, my reporting is not finding that. | ||
| Neither is my co-workers' reporting. | ||
| Well, it's a much more nuanced thing. | ||
| There are people that obviously are afraid. | ||
| There are people that are surprised. | ||
| There are people that are worried. | ||
| But there is even now still strong support among the farming community for the president. | ||
| And there's lots of reasons why, whether it is because they do feel that soybean farmers feel like they're going to be able to get some sort of support because they are kind of the focus of a lot of what's happening with the trade, the trade war and the trade fight with China. | ||
| It depends on which farmer you talk to, right? | ||
| So it's really difficult to make these kind of gross generalities about why farmers are doing what farmers do. | ||
| PJ, you mentioned President Trump's announcement that the U.S. will buy more beef from Argentina. | ||
| That, he said, is in an effort to bring down prices. | ||
| Explain why prices are high and how this action will affect the prices consumers see. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| So prices are high for a variety of reasons. | ||
| The U.S. has a cattle herd that is the smallest in almost 75 years. | ||
| It's that small largely because there were droughts that were devastating grazing lands. | ||
| You had higher feed prices. | ||
| Even, you know, more recently, avian influenza spread and the dairy herd was impacting beef that was going, you know, animals that were going to packers because dairy cows, when they are at the end of their life span or their productive span of producing milk, oftentimes are sold to beef packers to be used for making ground beef, right? | ||
| And the United States imports, and let me be clear, the United States imports quite a bit of beef. | ||
| What it does is it's known as beef trim, or it's to be able, a lot of times it's to be able to make types of beef to be able to make ground beef, right? | ||
| So the top countries we actually import beef and beef products from are Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. | ||
| The reason why this all flew in the face of the cattlemen is the idea that tariffs, or I'm sorry, that imports are seen as a threat to the cattle industry. | ||
| And the cattle industry inevitably goes through these very big swings where they will have a few years where prices are high and they're able to pay down debt and times are okay. | ||
| And then they will go through incredibly long stretches where like prices are terrible. | ||
| They're taking on enormous debt and people are losing their operations. | ||
| So the idea that Washington would be opening the door for what they see as a competitor to be able to bring in more beef and therefore, you know, in turn, in theory, you know, drive down prices, they saw that as a bit of a slap in the face. | ||
| Economists warn that imports, they doubt that they're actually going to lower beef prices, particularly not in the short term, because it takes a while to be able to do this. | ||
| The other concern that economists have actually told us is that it actually may in turn discourage U.S. herd expansion. | ||
| So the idea being that high prices are what cattle guys need in order to be able to be incentivized to keep growing their herd. | ||
| The other issue that I don't think a lot of people really understand is that there's a lot of these stories that are out talking about how cow calf operators or ranchers are just making money hand over fist because beef prices in the store are so high and everything's great. | ||
| But what you have to understand is that even replacement herds, replacement animals, they're replacing and buying a calf or a heifer or something like that. | ||
| Those animals are at record highs. | ||
| And so everything is really elevated right now. | ||
| So it's just, it's really complicated. | ||
| And the idea of being able to bring in a bunch of beef to bring down prices, it's just not that black and white. | ||
| James is calling from Banning, California, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Yes, I am a small-time trader, three or four contracts. | ||
| And with no selling of soybeans to China, there is hardly any trade, at least for little guys like me, that I can't even make any money. | ||
| Like soybeans went up four cents for the whole week. | ||
| And I've seen Soybeans go up 70, 80 cents during a time. | ||
| So I think Trump, President Trump, ought to give him a little respect there. | ||
| He overtalked himself talking to China all rough and tough and raggedy. | ||
| And China showed him: look, we're not buying a dog-gone soybean corn or any wheat. | ||
| So I think when you go over there next week, Trump, I hope you kind of calm down, sonny boy, and realize that you not only heard farmers, you heard us traders because we back farmers by buying their corn and all. | ||
| So I'll let you talk and help me out on this conversation. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You raise an excellent point. | ||
| You know, volatility in the trading markets and the commodity markets absolutely is where traders, whether they're big or small, can actually, you know, they can make their profits, right? | ||
| And in the gap of USDA data, you know, for the WASDE report, I mean, there's a lot of question about whether the November WASDE is even going to come out, depending on how long the government shutdown goes. | ||
| From what our sources are telling us, particularly larger funds and larger traders, a lot of them are kind of sitting on their powder, meaning that they're kind of holding back a little bit because they're trying to be able to wait and see what actually is going to come out, what is happening, you know, particularly what is going to come out of this, you know, this meeting that's happening between the president and Xi Jinping. | ||
| So, yeah, it is, you're raising an excellent point. | ||
| It's really difficult for small traders to be able to capitalize on commodity market trading when there isn't a ton of volatility in the market to capitalize on. | ||
| PJ Hepstetter is an agricultural commodities and farm economy reporter for Reuters. | ||
| Her and her colleagues have had a busy week. | ||
| You can find their reporting online at Reuters.com. | ||
| PJ, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you so much for having me. | |
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington to across the country. | ||
| Coming up Sunday morning, we'll talk with Republican pollster PJ Martino and Democratic pollster Nancy Zedankowicz on the politics surrounding the government shutdown and Campaign 2026. | ||
| And Brookings Institutions Patricia Kim covers President Trump's trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum and his upcoming meeting with China's Xi Jinping. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold new original series. | ||
| Sunday, with our guest, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, only the fifth woman to serve on the high court and author of the book, Listening to the Law. | ||
| She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | ||
| And what do you hope most people will take away from your book? | ||
| I think what I want them to take away from the book is that they should be proud of the court. | ||
| And I want them to be able, I want them to understand the way the court grapples with the legal questions that matter to the country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Watch America's Book Club with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. |