A tough row

Suicide rates are soaring among the last of the independent Wisconsin dairy farmers getting squeezed out by consolidation and a USDA program that isn’t helping. Net farm income has dropped in half in the Midwest over the decade. Iowa corn and soy farmers have lost money five years in a row. Loan delinquencies are at their highest levels since the Farm Debt Crisis of the mid-1980s.“Farmers and bankers are having difficult conversations,” said Aaron Heley Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, himself a crop and livestock farmer from central Iowa. “Because of the loss of farm income, we are losing equity as we speak. A lot of people don’t have enough equity left to get them through this.”Trade wars with China, Mexico and Canada tanked soybean markets for US farmers as Brazil emerged as a more reliable supplier. Rural people wonder when a third of the nation’s hogs are owned by a Chinese subsidiary, Smithfield Foods. And they wonder when JBS of Brazil, the biggest meatpacker, gets a disaster check from the USDA for Trump’s tariffs.Farmland prices in Iowa fell 3% this year. That’s a pretty big drain on the state’s balance sheet, and its effects are felt all over in fewer sales of pickup trucks and not much new iron moving off the farm implement dealer’s lot.