Thanks to PSPA Member Bettsy Mosimann for sharing this story.
For all his bluster about trade wars, President Trump seems willing to push China only so far: Witness the deal on Thursday to grant Chinese telecom giant ZTE a reprieve from harsh American penalties. The reason is likely to lead straight to Iowa soybean and corn farmers like Benjamin Schmidt.
Mr. Schmidt’s forebears have farmed the same land outside Iowa City for nearly 150 years. He and his father together till about 2,500 acres of the fertile prairie that stretches from Ohio through Nebraska. When I reached him last week, he was on his tractor, spreading fertilizer on this year’s corn crop.
Apart from the weather, hardly any issue looms larger for farmers than the prospect of retaliatory tariffs against American agriculture products. China has threatened a 25 percent tariff on soybeans and has already sharply curtailed purchases from the United States. This week Mexico imposed a 20 percent tariff on pork. The European Union and Canada have said they, too, will slap tariffs on a variety of American agricultural products.
“China is our most important export market for soybeans,” Mr. Schmidt said. “When your most important customer hits you with tariffs, there are going to be serious ramifications. My first reaction was this is going to hit us pretty hard.”
Grant Kimberley, who with his father farms 4,000 acres near Maxwell, Iowa, and is director of market development for the Iowa Soybean Association, was even more emphatic: “We want to sell to China, Mexico, whoever. We should be part of the solution, which is bringing down the trade imbalance.”
American farmers may be dwindling in absolute numbers, but they wield outsize influence in the raging war between protectionists and free traders in the Trump White House. That’s because of both the importance of their occupation to the balance of trade — United States agricultural exports have averaged nearly $140 billion a year since 2010 — and their geographical concentration in states that were critical to Mr. Trump’s 2016 electoral majority.
Much of the farm belt is solidly Republican. But Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota are presidential battlegrounds, where even a small defection of farmers could doom Mr. Trump’s re-election prospects.
Later this year, hotly contested Senate races in a swath of farm states — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana and North Dakota — will determine whether Republicans can maintain their majority in the Senate.
Mr. Schmidt is one of those voters up for grabs. He voted for Mr. Trump and leans Republican. “But I’m more of an independent,” he said. “I’m no Trumpeter. I’m still pondering whether he’s the right person for the job.”
He pointed out that Mr. Trump recently wrote on Twitter that China would be buying “massive amounts” of United States agricultural products, “one of the best things to happen to our farmers in many years,” only to renew the tariff threat days later.
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June 7, 2018, James B. Stewart, New York Times