Inflation Hasn't Gone Away

If you want to grow a good crop, you need to put in a couple of things—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Even then, you're going to need a good deal of prayer, planning, and rain to make things work.

Farming is what economists call a high-operating cost, low-margin business. To put it simply, it costs a lot of money to scratch out a living farming.

The cost of doing business on the farm has always been high, but the problem is that it's going up—and crop prices aren't. Since President Biden took office, inflation has gone up almost 18 percent across the board. That's put a hurting on families, who on average are paying $1,000 a month more just for the things they need, and farmers have taken a beating too.

The cost of fertilizers that farmers depend on to get phosphorus and potassium to their crops has gone up more than 35 percent since January 2021. Worse still, anhydrous ammonia prices have more than doubled since President Biden took office.

All of this is bad news, but add on to that rising cash rent, rising land prices, rising diesel costs, rising interest rates, and falling commodity prices and you get the perfect recipe for disaster. Input prices are still sky high, while it looks like farmers across the country are going to be getting a lot less when they go to market their crops.

In a vacuum, this is all bad news, but in President Biden's America, that's not even the tip of the iceberg. The EPA continues trying to weaponize WOTUS against farmers, even after the Supreme Court ordered them to stop. Key trade officials and ambassadors are refusing to stand up for farmers to enforce our trade agreements to support US agricultural exports. And liberals in Washington are still pushing to dramatically expand the death tax—and force countless family farms to be auctioned off at the courthouse steps just to pay the tax man.

This doesn't just add up to negligence. This isn't just about President Biden breaking his promise to stand up and support American farmers. The Biden Administration is waging all out war on family farms and rural America—and we're all paying the price.

We have to get our country back on track. It starts with balancing the budget and reining in inflation. But we've also got to get these unaccountable bureaucrats that seem to be running everything under control. Business as usual just isn't going to cut it.
 
Sincerely,

Sam Graves