Nebraska farmers can expect a portion of a $12 billion aid package announced by the Trump administration.
Ag producers have been hit with higher costs as a result of U.S. trade policies. The money to fund the so-called bridge payments is coming from the revenue the U.S. has collected from tariffs on other countries.
Ben Lilliston, director of climate and rural strategies for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, said the aid aims to ease an immediate cash flow problem for farmers receiving less for their crops, but does nothing to address the higher costs of equipment they use to process them.
“…many of those costs are associated with those tariffs,” said Lilliston, “so higher prices for machinery, for buildings, for crop inputs across the board.”
At least $1 billion of the $12 billion in aid will go to row crop farmers, which will have a big impact in Nebraska. The Trump administration said it imposed tariffs to level the international economic playing field with other countries.
Lilliston said farmers have already been getting less for their crops for the last five years, largely because of ag company consolidation, and added that the tariffs have made conditions even worse by disrupting export markets.
“When you don’t have export markets, then you can start to have a glut of commodity crops primarily, but could also be meat and poultry and those prices start to go down for farmers,” said Lilliston, “and so it’s sort of a perfect storm of issues here that farmers are facing and this is just really kind of a Band-Aid on much larger problem.”
Nebraska farmers are likely to start seeing payments from the aid package next February.
