Ohio’s farmers could be hit hard by President Trump’s new round of 50% tariffs on most goods from Canada that started Aug 22, and Canada's retaliatory tariffs starting Sept. 8. But they're also very concerned about another big tariff action that starts on Tuesday.
Farmers support the goal of leveling the playing field with other countries, which tariffs seek to do, said Jack Irvin with the Ohio Farm Bureau. But they’ve been mostly critical of tariffs, including the 90-day expansion of lower-tariff imports for up to 300,000 metric tons of beef, which Trump said will lower record prices consumers have been paying.
“That's certainly an area where we're pushing back and raising some concerns," said Jack Irvin with the Ohio Farm Bureau in an interview for "The State of Ohio".
"The number of cattle that we have in the United States is approaching numbers we haven't seen since the early 1970s," Irvin said. "[It's] the smallest herd we've had in a long time. That is certainly having an impact on prices."
Irvin said cattle farmers are trying to rebuild their herds after sell-offs during last year’s historic drought in Ohio.
"How is importing going to help us do that? If you're going to depress the price potentially—and that's kind of the goal, to depress the price—that is going to create a disincentive for farmers to reinvest," Irvin said. "It's very cattle is very expensive. It's not a quick turnaround. You don't just flip a switch and you get a steak on the on the retail shelf."
The American Farm Bureau Federation sent a letter to Trump asking him to reconsider. In it, AFB President Zippy Duvall wrote: "A 90-day suspension of the tariff rate quota on imported ground beef has created apprehension and chaos in the cattle market."
Irvin said it's been a tough time for farmers, with costs up for fuel, equipment and fertilizer and continued costs for transportation, marketing and everything it takes to get from the farm to the grocery store.
"Overall the costs are much higher than the prices that they're able to receive," Irvin said. "Most farmers are seeing between like six to eleven cents on every dollar that you and I spend, so very little is actually going back to the farm. So many other costs involved in that, from the transportation to the marketing to, you know, the different cost to put it on the retail shelf, etc."
And Irvin said the data center debate is raging among farmers too.
"We've lost a million football fields essentially in agriculture. Now that's everything from housing, warehouses, business, etc. And certainly data centers are a big component of that," Irvin said, adding that modern farms use a lot of data. "We recognize that like a lot of the services we use are going through data centers. So we're not anti-data centers. But can we be smart about where and how we develop as a state and potentially have some guardrails in place?"
Both Democratic candidate for governor Amy Acton and Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy both said they want new data centers to be built other sites besides farmland. The plan on Ramaswamy's website would "emphasize the use of vacant and former industrial sites known as brownfields, rather than the use of fertile farmland." Acton appears to go further, saying on her website: "New data centers coming to Ohio must be built on brownfields and previously developed industrial sites, not farms or in the hearts of our communities."
