I'm no farmer; but I've been listening to a lot of soy farmers being interviewed by NPR about their predicament due to Donnie's tariffs on China, their largest consumer. Let's face it, a lot of them voted for him; and when asked about him, they ham and haw because they have choices to make that they don't like.

The Chinese system is horrible, their social practices are despicable, their trading practices really do disadvantage us, their political repression is well known, their labor camps continue, so.... fuck 'em. That said, I would like the "fuck 'em" to come in a different form than Donnie's way....

Soooo, here we are: stuck with Donnie's way, and a climate change that Donnie dismisses and that has dumped too much water on the "soy land", making it impossible to get a good crop of the stuff this year anyway. In addition, despite government bailouts and subsidies (because, like every other nation, we do subsidize our farmers, even though the Republicans hate to admit it- and by "farmers”, I mean Big Farma...) the suicide rate for farmers is increasing....

Again, I'm no farmer, I can barely keep up with my garden; but what if, given these political and real changes, we changed farming practices in this country and actually supported that change? What if, instead of giving out Band-Aids to big monoculture farms, we looked for better ways of working the land? It has to be better than current practices for the new world that is coming our way. What if farmers were incentivized to find out what the land can sustain? What if they diversified their production and were supported for doing so? ....Of course, Conagra and ADM etc would balk at lining politician pockets with such an interruption in their profit stream...

And one more again, I'm not a farmer...