Friday Farming News: Rhode Island directly purchases farms to preserve farming. Midwestern farmers worry about trade wars

Rhode Island farm, 1917

In an effort to preserve its farms and to allow young people to get into farming, the State of Rhode Island is buying farms that are for sale, irrespective of their inflated development value, and then reselling them to young farmers at their agricultural value with restrictive covenants on future development.

Good for Rhode Island.

The development pressure in a place like Rhode Island, one of the most densely populated states in the union, have to be intense.  But none the less there remain young people there who desire to farm.  Their farming efforts, based on the article I read about this new program, are market farms, or market gardening type farms, on very small acreages. The price of land is intense.  A real uphill battle.  I'm glad the state recognizes the value of having land preserved in this fashion and give them a lot of credit for taking this on.

Not everyone is.  One older farmer complained that "this is what the Communist did".

Nope, that's not what the Communist did at all.  

This is what those with an eye towards the future, with an agrarian eye, and a Distributist eye do in the present, in Rhode Island, and hopefully more places in the US in the future.

Driving pigs, 1916.

If politicians back east are worrying about the fortune of farming in their states, at least in one case, in the Midwest they're worrying about a trade war with China.

Well, all the way into the West, it turns out.

China in recent years has become an enormous importer of American pork and it was just set to become a major importer of American beef.  With the US set to ramp up tariffs on Chinese steel and other products China is retaliating, or threatening to, with tariffs on food imports to that country from the United States.

The wisdom of putting tariffs on food imports is really questionable, but it would hurt beef and pork producers to be sure.  All of this is a lesson on how ignoring a trade problem in its infancy, and we definitely have a long running one with China, is a really bad idea.

China is an international trade menace as it doesn't play fair and it steals information from other nations.  It should be slapped down, but that slapping should have occurred a decade ago.  We didn't do that, and as the GOP and the Democrats have been complicit in a cheap goods policy that basically encouraged the exporting of manufacturing overseas (one of the major factors that lead to the rise of Trump) they jointly had low motivation to address it.

Cheap goods, of course, are fine if you have the money to buy them from your good paying job, but once you have no jobs, that's pretty academic and that's what's happened in a lot of the American Rust Belt.  Those folks are mad, and Trump is their herald.  So we're hurtling towards a belated trade war that may very well be way too late and rather economically bloody, something that Trump should rethink and the suit and tie class, including the last couple of Presidents, ought to be berated for allowing to be set up.

A real oddity of it, however, is than it this process the American economy started to rhyme with the economy of the late 19th Century.  Not duplicate it, but mirror it.  The US was always a major agricultural producer but in the declining era of heavy manufacturing that sector of the economy has improved and become more important. . . sort of like it was prior to the 1890s.

Now, things are changing again as some manufacturing is returning to the US.  Trump has been getting credit for this, but that takes years to occur and likely reflects the cycle of manufacturing development.  So things are bouncing back in a more high tech fashion as the US has kept the lead there, a byproduct of a bunch of things but particularly of a good university system that, while it supports piles of fluff, does the important stuff really well.  Contrary to widespread "progressive" views the US is very near the top in producing university graduates. So much so that a lot of them can't find work in their chosen fields.

Anyhow, shades of the early 1890s here. . . which isn't good.  

Recall the Depression of 1893?