Drought, Continued

1.

Last week a farmer called and asked if I had any cotton trash. I told him he had the wrong number. Despite being from Mississippi, I’ve never grown cotton in my life. No one near me grows cotton either. The soil and the weather aren’t right. You have to travel at least fifty miles east, well below the fall line, to find the first cotton field. The man was old, well over ninety. Of course he knew what I know. He’d gotten me mixed up with someone else. He asked me who I was, and when I finished telling him, I asked him why he wanted cotton trash. He said that he has run out of feed for his cows. He used up all his hay, his neighbors are hoarding what’s left, and no rain means no forage in the field.

Cotton trash is a farmer’s term of art. When the big, white, fluffy bolls get tossed inside the hopper of a gin, it descends to a series of interlocking ribs and saws that move back and forth across the fibers, stretching and pulling them inward. The slick, oily cottonseed is too big to pass through, so it usually drop onto a conveyor belt, which shuttles them outside to a pile somewhere. The cottonseeds are then trucked to plant and pressed, like olives or soybeans, into cottonseed oil. Cotton trash is what’s left of the seed once the oils are pressed out. I don’t know anything about its nutritional profile--I’ve never had to use it--but I associate the stuff with hard times. When you need to find cotton trash, you know you’re hard up.

A few days ago I witnessed a silly social media fight between journalists and economists. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused the prices of fuel and fertilizer to hit the stratosphere. Since February, the prices for urea and anhydrous ammonia, two key ingredients for nitrogen fertilizer, have ballooned 40 per cent. How will these prices affect American farmers, they asked. Some insisted that, if the spike has any effect, it will be delayed until next year, at which point the USDA and Congress will have figured out how to deal the fallout. Most farmers are in the habit of securing their own fertilizer, seed, and equipment ahead of time, typically after harvest season, when they are most likely to have the cash to do it. It helps them lock in rates ahead of planting season. The practice is called pre-booking, another term of art, and it is in ordinary circumstances what commodity growers do.

A survey the Farm Bureau released last week paints a very different picture. 70 per cent of the nearly six-thousand respondents say they cannot afford the fertilizer they need to buy to plant this spring, as in right now. In the Southeast, only 19 per cent of farmers said they had fertilizer pre-booked. In the Midwest, the number sits at 67 per cent. The figures for farmers out west and in the northeast sit at around 30 per cent.

What do commodity growers do when they don’t have the fertilizer they need? They don’t plant. But what do they do when the price spike happens in the middle of the driest three-month stretch in the contiguous States since 1895? I’m not sure. The ones who didn’t pre-book might feel relief for a moment. Fertilizer costs are typically associated with 33 to 45 per cent of the cost of raising wheat and corn. Equipment and seed also cost money, but it is a significant investment. Farmers who didn’t prebook didn’t buy anything, so now they don’t have to find a way to get their money back. But no fertilizer and no rain means they have to find a different source of income this year. It’s a tight spot. Many will give up: they will declare bankruptcy or sell their farms. I am worried about what it will mean for the remaining mid-sized farms owned by black farmers. They are in a particularly vulnerable position.

2.

Last Wednesday I attended a summit on impact investing and regenerative agriculture. During the closing remarks, one of the conveners got up and gave an impassioned speech about the state of agriculture in the US. We are living through the worst crisis in farming since the 1980’s, he said. It’s not hard to see why. For decades commodity crop prices have declined and the cost of inputs keeps going up. As of 2022, the average age of the American farmer was 58.1 years. According to the American Farmland Trust, one third of all privately-owned farmland in the US will change hands in the next twenty years. Given the acuity of the situation right now--war, drought, price spikes--it’s not unreasonable to think that the number is accelerating. In 2025, farm foreclosures increased by nearly 50 per cent. Whatever the figures for 2026 will be, you can bet they will be higher.

Last week, the USDA announced a $300-million-dollar deal with Palantir Technologies, the intelligence and defense company. Ostensibly the deal is to consolidate the woefully disparate and confusing services that the USDA (US Department of Agriculture, FSA (Farm Service Agency), and the NRCS (Natural Resources and Conservation Services) offers to US farmers. But the circumstances of the deal are concerning. Formally, the contract is a part of the “National Farm Security Action Plan,” the new farm bill, one major goal of which is to end the purchase of American farmland by foreign entities. Setting limits on foreign ownership of American farmland is all well and good. Saudi control of farm leases in Arizona has decimated the agriculture and ecology of that state’s most water-hungry regions. The problem with the Farm Security Action Plan is that it explicitly rebrands agriculture and the USDA as entities that belong to the bailiwick of national security, and therefore subject to direct federal and perhaps military intervention.

Farmers have a long history of being bailed out by direct aid. Maybe it’s nothing new. But there’s something deeply unsettling about the involvement of Palantir, an intelligence and defense company, in the affairs of farmers. This is the same company that actively facilitated war crimes in Gaza and continues to lend its unwavering support, both moral and technical, to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Its CEO, Alex Karp, happens to be a techno-fascist maniac. (If you haven’t done so already, have a peek at the manifesto the company released a few days ago). Vice-President Vance has deep and abiding ties to Karp, to Palantir and to Palantir’s founder, Peter Thiel. It’s worth saying again that Vance initially funded AcreTrader, a venture capital fund that makes it easier for investors to add ownership of US land to their portfolios. The company purchases “shares” of cropland from farmers who are experiencing crippling levels of debt and in return gives them cash. It’s unknown what his ties to the company still are.

3.

A headline hit my email inbox this morning. Since the war with Iran, US financial markets have outperformed the markets of every other nation on the earth. Lower and middle class people are feeling the pinch of rising food, housing, and energy costs, drought is wreaking havoc across the continental US, industrial agricultural systems are stumbling, and the portfolia of the rich swell with dividends. I suppose it is one measure of the complexity of contemporary economy, a measure of how different things are now than they were a hundred years ago, that the bruised and tattered state of agriculture has no direct impact on the broader economic condition of the country. It’s more diffuse now, or perhaps is felt in different or delayed ways. We’re less afraid of direct monetary bail-outs. Or maybe it’s that war is just that good for business.

“The land, like our skin, is bound to conserve the traces of past wounds,” wrote Fernand Braudel, the great historian of the Mediterranean. What will be the scars of this year’s wounds? Where on the land will we see them? In the after-affects of drought, in failing or the non-existent crops, in the data centers. In the consolidation of farmland into the hands of the rich and powerful. In the uncannily fierce and sudden storms. In the overwhelmingly harmful environmental cost of wars, plural, which the whole planet will feel, if in the typically disproportionate and unjust patterns.

4.

It looks like the new farm bill, the National Farm Security Action Plan, will hit the floor of the US House this week or possibly next. A friend of mine at the Rural Advancement Fund (RAFI), Rachel, has written an excellent summary about why your representative should vote “no” to the bill. To read it, I think you have to subscribe to RAFI. If you can’t or haven’t done that right now, then have a look at this post from the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which talks about what’s in the bill. Read it, if you like, and if you feel compelled, call your rep and tell them why the bill’s bad and how it could be better.