ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER COVER STORY 6 Owen Roberts Trump’s agricultural agenda Farmers everywhere are impacted Agricultural exports and the future of crop protection are among the threats to American farmers since President Donald Trump began his second term, instituting highly controversial measures to fulfill his "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) mandate. Exactly how agriculture will endure is anyone’s guess, but there’s no question the ripple effect is being felt everywhere, including Canada. Export-dependent U.S. grain farmers may be most vulnerable to the Trump administration’s policies and priorities. The combination of waning markets due to the president’s tariff policies, along with the negative connection being purported between Americans’ health and widely used crop protection products, is making an impact on Trump’s polling numbers: a May poll showed that 46 per cent of rural voters approve of Trump's job performance, while 45 per cent disapprove. That was a big change since February, when 59 per cent approved and 37 per cent disapproved. But it is not totally unexpected. As far back as January, at the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) annual convention in San Antonio, Texas, AFBF President Zippy Duvall warned convention delegates of the inherent threat of uninformed elected officials who wave the MAGA flag. “Many of them, they’re not familiar with agriculture, and some of them have ideas that would set us back years in modern-day farming and interrupt our food security,” he said. “Now, how we engage with these skeptics of modern agriculture is tremendously important.” Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News via Getty Images
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