All posts tagged "Farming"

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs policy brought Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs into the national spotlight in Trump's first term, when he sent a message asking Trump to consider how his global trade war hurt American agriculture.

After Trump returned to the White House last year and enacted a stream of even more aggressive — if fluctuating — tariffs on global trade, Gibbs felt the need to speak out again.

“It’s such a déjà vu moment,” Gibbs said, “because we're right back in the same situation, right back there, right now, the same doggone thing as 2018.”...

The inability of Florida farmers to find Americans willing to work to fill jobs abandoned by immigrants fearful of being taken into custody has some of them stating they will have to cut back on future plantings out of fear of going out of business.

According to a report from NPR, those farmers have suffered losses of almost half their seasonal workers and can’t afford to replace them with H2A visa workers as has been suggested by Donald Trump administration officials.

NPR’s Jasmine Garsd is reporting that despite pleas from farmers to grant amnesty to farm workers, the Trump administration is resisting, with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins telling them, “Ultimately, the answer to this is automation. And then also when you think about it, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America.”...

American farmers are openly questioning why the Trump administration has betrayed them on so many issues, from tariffs to mass deportations.

The Washington Post editorial board called the onslaught a "barrage of friendly fire," since the majority of farmers are, in fact, "solidly Republican."

One of the biggest problems for farmers has been President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts, since "roughly half of crop farmworkers are estimated to lack legal immigration status," according to the piece....

Tank tracks still fresh on his field in southern Gaza’s coastal area of Al-Mawasi, Nedal Abu Jazar lamented the damage war has wrought on his trees and crops.

“Look at the destruction,” the 39-year-old farmer told AFP, holding an uprooted tomato plant.He pointed to his greenhouse’s metal frame and its white plastic sheeting strewn across the plot, inside an area designated a humanitarian zone by the Israeli army “People were sitting peacefully on their farmland … and suddenly tanks arrived and fired at us, and then there were (air) strikes.”

Abu Jazar said the Israeli operation in late June destroyed about 40 dunams (10 acres) of land and killed five labourers....

Oranges – and all the things we can make from them – are big business. But the industry is facing a severe crisis.

About 50 million tonnes of oranges are grown each year, 34% of them in Brazil. Brazil is also the world’s biggest exporter of orange juice by far, producing about 70% of global supply.

But Brazil’s orange-growing regions have recently endured extreme drought and heat stress in the crop’s flowering period, as well as alarming rates of citrus greening disease – an incurable bacterial infection.
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