A number of U.S. ag leaders, including National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) President Kenneth Hartman, Jr., say that several recent decisions made by President Trump and his administration have caused concerns for America’s farmers.
“One of the things that we’ve been on top of is concerns about tariffs. But at the same time, with concerns about tariffs, we’re hoping that the Trump administration works on some trade agreements,” says Hartman.
He says he and his team are pushing the Trump administration to work out a new trade agreement with India.
“India has a growing population. They’re trying to work on cleaning their environment up with ethanol, so we feel like that’s a great place where the President can work on a trade agreement with ethanol and with corn and with dry distillers’ grain. Not only on the tariff side of it, but also on the concerns that they’re not very friendly to biotech products, so we’re hoping that we can work some things out there,” says Hartman.
“Vietnam is an opportunity. Indonesia, the Philippines, and all these Asian countries are opportunities. And then, there are some opportunities that we feel like in the Africa area too, so that’s something that we’re concerned with and working on,” he says.
Beyond tariffs and trade, Hartman says he and his team are also deeply concerned about the comments that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. have made about crop protection products—as well as the fallout from the recent report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission.
“We very much have concerns there because there are a lot of products and products that have been named, such as Atrazine and glyphosate, that we’ve been using for many years, that are very instrumental in crop protection when it comes to raising crops. We hope that when they talk about studying this, they don’t try to take some of these products away from us. So, there’s a concern there.
“We’re also very much reaching out to the MAHA group that we’d like to be participating in some of these studies and finding out more about how they’re going to go about this because these products like Atrazine and glyphosate have been studied for many, many years, and now we’re going to start all over, it sounds like. So that’s some frustration there.”
Hartman adds that the Reconciliation Bill—or the “Big Beautiful Bill” as President Trump has described it—is another big concern since the legislation includes a number of ag-related items and policies that would normally go in a separate Farm Bill. The Reconciliation Bill narrowly passed the U.S. House by one vote and may face heavy scrutiny in the U.S. Senate.
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