If you think I’m biased, you’re right. Here’s what I think, which results in what I’ve been sharing with you.
A healthy agricultural community is critical to the health of the United States. It’s a matter of national security that family farms not just survive, but thrive. When they thrive, so do our rural communities, and when rural communities thrive, it trickles UP to everyone.
To me, that means that our policies as a country, especially our trade policy and our agriculture policy, should focus on what makes our producers and our rural communities more successful. Trade relationships are difficult to develop and so easy to destroy. We know this from the decades it took to build our corn and soybean trade with China and how quickly that trade relationship was destroyed due to tariffs. I’m not an economist, but I do know a lot about animal behavior, and it’s a no-brainer to predict that China would find its supply somewhere else if working with the U.S. became difficult.
This is not about Republican vs Democrat. This is about supporting the people who are critical to the U.S. and its ability to feed its citizens. I really don’t understand why that is so hard to do, but it surely seems to be.
And I don’t care about trans people, or who marries whom. That doesn’t affect whether we feed ourselves, whether our rural communities are happy and healthy. But policy does. So that’s my bias when it comes to talking about trade and agriculture policy.
I just thought you all might want to know.
Thanks for reading,
Kathy
