AGRICULTURE/IMMIGRATION/TRADE WAR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “For the first three weeks of July, Peter Martens prayed for rain. At the end of the month the rain finally arrived, but by then it was too late for some of his crops. For others, it was too much water, too quickly. The lack of rain, Mr. Martens said, will reduce his corn yield by about 20 percent, but the late-summer deluges damaged the quality of his spelt, a type of wheat. New York’s extreme weather this summer, which began with a drought followed by flash flooding, has been enough to make it a difficult season for the state’s farmers. But farmers say President Trump’s trade war and his administration’s crackdown on immigration have made a bad summer far worse. Red numbers are filling farmers’ balance sheets: Mr. Martens’s butternut squash is covered in weeds because he did not have enough workers, at the right time, to hoe the field and now his yield will be far less than he expected. He is also nervous about selling his red kidney beans because higher tariffs abroad threaten to drive down the price as international markets disappear. ‘There was always something that did well,’ Mr. Martens said about the variety of crops on his farm in Penn Yan, N.Y. ‘Now if nothing does well, what do you do?’ Farmers across the country are asking the same question, as they endure economic losses because of Mr. Trump’s trade policies.”
–Tyler Pager, “Blame Trump’s Tariffs and the Weather. New York’s Farmers Do.,” The New York Times online, August 22, 2018