Are farmers playing checkers while everyone else is playing chess? 

By David Hardin, Chair, ISA’s Membership and Policy Committee 

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, are we playing checkers while everyone else is playing chess? Are we being strategic and thinking several moves ahead, or are we being reactive and just putting out fires as they pop up? We ask this question on our farms every day. 

Do you take the time to do the preventative maintenance on your tractor, or do you wait until something breaks and suffer the downtime while you wait on a service technician to show up in the field? The same principle can be used when it comes to farm policy and advocating for the soybean industry. 

While the bridge payments that many of us received in the first quarter of this year were helpful to the bottom line, they were necessary because we hadn’t done the things we needed to future proof our industry. I’m not saying that we need to anticipate every black swan event and have a contingency plan for it, but we do on issues that can have a high impact on soy producers with reasonable odds of happening. 

There are three areas I see where we need to urgently engage with Congress and the administration to prevent future harm. The first is access to reasonably priced fertilizer. We need to make sure that we have domestic or near shored production capacity that doesn’t expose us to geopolitical risk in places like the Persian Gulf or the Straits of Malacca. 

We don’t need tariffs on Moroccan phosphates that increase our annual costs by more than $1billion annually. There aren’t domestic deposits of phosphate rock to replace that imported product currently. 

The second issue is one that House punted on during the recent farm bill debate. Crop protection manufacturers need clarity in labeling laws that protect them from costly litigation and a patchwork of rules from one jurisdiction to another. 

Companies like Corteva or BASF aren’t going to invest billions of dollars in creating a new active ingredient if we don’t have federal pre-emption. They don’t want to deal with 50 state regulators in addition to federal ones. There is also increased likelihood of lawsuits and their associated costs. This leads to one of two outcomes: No new pesticide products in the pipeline in an era of super weeds, or greatly increased costs to the farmer for any new products. 

Lastly, the Trump Administration is planning to roll out new Section 301 tariffs to replace the ones struck down by the Supreme Court. If this is done in a clumsy fashion, we risk undoing all the hard-won trade deals we have or reigniting the trade war while we are already dealing with higher input costs. 

Indiana soybean farmers and our partners at ISA and the American Soybean Association (ASA) need to stay engaged in Washington, D.C., to ensure our future success. 

These are just a few of the major challenges we have to deal with, as I see it. Get your voice involved in the discussion. Your views will add to our strength as an interest. To join ISA’s Membership and Policy Committee, contact Khyla Goodman by email at kgoodman@indianasoybean.com.