The administration’s far-left policies are hostile to all production agriculture, and are increasing costs for farming and ranching operations of all sizes.
The Biden administration's far-left policies are hostile to all production agriculture, and are increasing business costs for farming and ranching operations of all sizes.
O nce again, the Biden administration is attempting to evade responsibility for its own failures. Just last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tried to claim that meat prices were up not because of the highest consumer-price inflation this country has seen in nearly four decades, but because of private-sector profiteering.
“When people go to the grocery store and they’re trying to buy a pound of meat, two pounds of meat, ten pounds of meat, the prices are higher,” Psaki told the press. In Joe Biden’s view, that is “because of — you could call it corporate greed, sure,” she said. “You could call it jacking up prices during a pandemic.”
I grew up on the end of a scoop shovel and a pitchfork, the son of a rural Nebraska tenant farmer and a seamstress. As a veterinarian, family farmer, and livestock producer, I’ve spent my entire life in agriculture, founding and growing a successful livestock business. When the Biden administration points the finger at anyone else for rising food prices, I can say with authority that its blame game is hogwash.
The Biden administration is right about one thing: The price of meat has skyrocketed. In the last year, the price of beef has risen over 20 percent, pork is up over 6 percent, and poultry has increased over 5 percent. The price of meat has outpaced the overall growth of grocery costs, which have increased 5 percent since last year. These prices reflect a larger inflationary trend in the economy, with costs of fuel, cars, building materials, and other industrial and consumer products all rising.
The price of food has gone up, but there is no one who understands responding to the needs of the American consumer better than our farmers and livestock producers. We’ve been doing it for generations, constantly working to produce more, higher-quality food for less.
Biden’s agenda is causing the rise in food prices and squeezing middle-class household budgets for two simple reasons. First, the Biden administration has focused on spending trillions of borrowed dollars to advance its socialist agenda, driving up the cost of inputs for farmers, ranchers, and everyone else in the food-supply chain.
The cost of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer, equipment, and seed, has risen dramatically in the last year as a result of the federal government printing, borrowing, and spending trillions of dollars to advance its big-government, socialist agenda. Democrats’ lockdown policies, paying people not to work, have hurt livestock producers’ ability to hire qualified workers.
When I was a kid, my father taught me to treat nickels as if they were manhole covers. We had to, because if we weren’t profitable every year, we’d lose the farm. Biden’s position is just the opposite: When you’re broke, you just keep spending. As a result, we are seeing crushing inflation throughout our economy, hurting the vulnerable families and fixed-income seniors Biden’s socialist policies purport to help.
In addition to Biden’s complete fiscal irresponsibility, he and his allies are promoting policies that amount to a war on production agriculture, pushing new regulations and initiatives that could permanently increase the cost of raising and processing livestock. This would accomplish Democrats’ goal of pushing plant-based proteins into the American diet and making meat more cost-prohibitive for the average consumer — an absurdity, given that every society in human history has aspired to eat more meat, not less. One of Biden’s first acts as president was to initiate a plan to triple the amount of U.S. land put into conservation by 2030, an initiative known as “30 by ’30.” Currently, less than 10 percent of U.S. land is in conservation programs. In my state of Nebraska, over 97 percent of land is held privately.
This policy would be devastating to agriculture, taking massive amounts of land off of the property-tax rolls and out of agricultural production. To achieve Biden’s radical goal would require an unprecedented federal land grab that would violate landowners’ property rights, cripple crop and livestock production, and drive up the price of food nationwide.
To make matters worse, the Biden administration is reviving the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, creating massive new regulatory burdens and giving the Environmental Protection Agency sweeping new authority over farmland.
Make no mistake, the assault on farming and livestock production practices has never been more evident than it is now. The Biden administration’s far-left policies are hostile toward all production agriculture, and are increasing the cost of doing business for farming and ranching operations of every size.
It’s no surprise that Joe Biden and Jen Psaki, whose only meaningful experiences with agriculture probably come from weekly trips to Washington, D.C., farmers’ markets, don’t understand why food prices are rising. If we want food prices to be lower, we need an administration that understands agriculture, values fiscal responsibility, and wants to make it easier, not harder, for our farmers and ranchers to grow food without the federal government getting in the way.