Farmer who left GOP says ‘farm wives’ should worry Trump – By Adriana Belmonte (Yahoo Finance) / Dec 17 2019
The U.S. and China are prepared to sign phase one of a trade deal, and President Trump tweeted that China “agreed to many structural changes and massive purchases of Agricultural Product, Energy, and Manufactured Goods.”
But the deal — even if China follows through with the agricultural purchases — may not undo the damage that has been done to American agriculture since the tit-for-tat tariffs began in March 2018.
And Ohio soybean farmer Chris Gibbs, who left the GOP after becoming particularly frustrated with Trump’s trade and agricultural policies and is now considering a run for office, thinks that Trump should worry about the spouses of farmers heading into the 2020 presidential election.
“I’ve talked to farm wives,” Gibbs said on Yahoo Finance’s On the Move. “And what they’re looking for their farms, when they look out over the horizon, they want some predictability. And they don’t want to see storm clouds for their farms, for their families, and moving those farms on down through the generations. And the administration’s failed on both of those for family farms.”
It’s important to note that not all spouses of farmers are wives: Women make up 36% of the roughly 3.4 million farmers in the U.S., a number that has increased by 27% over the last five years, according to the latest Census of Agriculture. Furthermore, 56% of the roughly 2 million farms in the U.S. employ at least one female producer and 38% of U.S. farms are run by a woman.
Nevertheless, Gibbs predicted that “farm wives are a place where the president has some real vulnerability because those farm wives, when they go into the ballot box, they’re going to use this pen like a samurai sword.”
Continue to article: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/farmer-who-left-gop-trump-204359796.html?guccounter=1
Ruth, wife of farmer Sid Ready, gestures as she stands on the ditch which hold most of the flood water away from their farm near Scribner, Nebraska on May 5, 2019. (Photo: Johannes EISELE / AFP)
