March 20, 2025 01:30 PM UTC

Colorado Farmer Warns Trump Policies Could Have Lasting Negative Effects on Crop Growers

• 3 Comments
• by: Owen Swallow

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Originally posted at the Colorado Times Recorder

The Trump Administration has made sweeping changes to American public policy over its first two months, from shuttering the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to downsizing the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and instigating a trade war with Canada, Mexico, China, and other nations.

All these policy changes are having a direct impact on local Colorado farmers.

Roy Pfaltzgraff operates PFZ Farms, a family farm in Phillips County that has been in the family for three generations. The farm covers 2,200 acres in the town of Haxtun, where Pfaltzgraff grows gluten-free grains including sorghum and corn.

The market value of crops grown in Colorado, including nursery and greenhouse crops, totaled more than $2.8 billion in 2022. Add in livestock, poultry, and their products, such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, and eggs, the total value topped $6.4 billion that year.

Pfaltzgraff says that he has been trying to navigate the uncertainty caused by the administration’s changes pause of USAID, cuts to the USDA, and other policies, all of which impact the two most fundamental of economic forces: supply and demand.

“USAID sources a lot of bushels of grain from the commodity market, so by them buying it out of the commodity market, it reduces the supply which supports the price. There is a food program that buys red grain sorghum [one of PFZ Farms’ staple crops],” Pfaltzgraff explains.  “Kansas is the largest producer of red grain sorghum in the United States and, last year, that program bought upwards of 150 million bushels of grain sorghum – the vast majority of that goes into that program. With that program eliminated, there is no ready market that can absorb the huge volume. So then, those [owners of grain] elevators are going to have to find somewhere to sell it.”

Red sorghum is a cereal grain typically used for animal feed, but that is also used in a variety of baking products. It is the third largest crop Colorado produces, with over an estimated 17 millions bushels produced annually. Without USAID buying these grains, they would sit in grain elevators on farms, having to be sold before they spoil.

Pfaltzgraff is concerned that flooding the market will cause a cascading effect on the price farmers can sell their goods at. With cheap sorghum on the market, ranchers will opt for to use that as feed before corn, which will deflate [reduce demand on] the corn market in turn.

Pfaltzgraff continued: “At some point, and my guess is about the second week of June –because that’s when the wheat harvest starts– those grain elevators are going to have to clear their inventory. Instead of buying corn, they’re going to buy this cheap sorghum. Then there’s going to be a glut of corn on the market, then the exact same thing will happen over again. It’s going to drive the price in the commodity market down significantly, which then bleeds into other markets.”

In addition to buying sorghum, USAID programs buy excess corn, wheat, and a bunch of other commodity grains that they ship overseas.

With the massive supply of grain in domestic markets, which would driving down the returns farmers would get on their crops.

Pfaltzgraff says this will actually cost the federal government more in the long run.

The U.S. government sets a minimum price for agricultural commodities, granted that the minimum is low. Then through the Price Loss Coverage program, the Department of Agriculture pays the difference if the price a farmer sells a good at drops below that price.

“Say the commodity market goes to $2.50 a bushel and the floor is at $3 a bushel, the government will make up that 50 cents a bushel. So they cut these programs [like USAID], saying that it’s going to save a bunch of money, but in the long run, it actually could cost significantly more,” Pfaltzgraff explained.

Deflating the price of consumer goods would cause the USDA to step in, spending their budget to stabilize farmers who produce certain goods.

Just because the price of certain agricultural products drops in the commodity market, Pfaltzgraff says consumers likely wouldn’t see that at the supermarket.

“The middleman always absorbs the price difference. A couple of years ago, the price of flour and the price of bread and everything went up because of the increase in commodity market prices,” Pfaltzgraff says. “Food companies take that and they point to the news and say, ‘Oh, well the cost of grain has gone up, we have to raise our prices.’ Now the price of grain has returned to that historical average and the price of food hasn’t gone back down. So it doesn’t necessarily translate to cheaper food for people.”

Pfaltzgraff says that it’s not just cuts to USAID that are impacting Colorado farmers, the wider cuts made to the Department of Agriculture (USDA) have also caused uncertainty for local farmers.

“The tariff issues that happened in the previous Trump [term], that really hurt farmers back in 2017 and farms haven’t recovered from that. So farms are already struggling,” Pfaltzgraff says. “When we were meeting with our banker, one of the income items that we list is government payments that we receive because we’re involved in a natural resource conservation program called the Conservation Stewardship Program. With CSP, we are essentially receiving a government payment to adopt new methods that improve soil health, reduce the amount of fertilizer usage… do things that are generally good for conservation.”

Pfaltzgraff’s farm is in the second year of a five-year CSP contract. Pfaltzgraff says that when the bank was reviewing the line items, the bank flagged that as an area of concern.

“The bank actually looked at it and said ‘We’re not sure that you’re actually going to get paid that.’ So the banks are even questioning if some of these programs are going to exist,” Pfaltzgraff added.

“Some of those grants, we’ve already actually invested the funds to do our work, those grants are actually reimbursements of money that we have spent,” Pfaltzgraff says. “We spent the money to improve portions of our farm with the understanding that we were going to get some of it reimbursed.”

Pfaltzgraff said that more generally, federal program reductions were trickling down to local offices.

“USDA was one of those that was hit and in our local offices, people were let go because they were there for less than a year or they’ve been in that position for less than a year,” Pfaltzgraff said, referring to the USDA’s Philips County Farm Service Agency in nearby Holyoke.

“Both the Farm service agency office and the Natural Resource Conservation [Service] offices, both of those are generally understaffed. They make the best they can with the workforce that they have, and then when they finally hire somebody, it makes them a lot more efficient… it takes them about a year to get people trained, [now] once they get this person trained… they’ve been let go.”

In addition to cuts made to local offices, Pfaltzgraff says the ongoing trade war and tariffs imposed by the Trump administration will cripple small farmers. Farmers already experienced the results of tariffs from the first Trump administration, which Pfaltzgraff says many local farmers still haven’t recovered.

“I compare it to a college student, that student has a favorite pizza place — for some reason, that pizza place has to shut down for two weeks,” Pfaltzgraff says. “That college student isn’t going to wait two weeks for another pizza, so they’re going to find a different pizza place. When the original place opens up, they generally aren’t going to go back. This is the same thing in the world market.”

“We saw this in 2017 when corn and soybeans had tariffs put on them. Other countries put tariffs on those on it because it was an easy target. So [foreign markets] started buying corn and soybeans from Argentina or Brazil, when the tariffs go away, they’re going to continue to buy from Argentina and Brazil. We got forced out of the market.  The only chance that we have of returning to the market is if something happens in Argentina and Brazil.”

The number of farms in Colorado has decreased by 7% since 2017 but increased by 15% since 2002. There are more than 30.2 million acres of farmland in Colorado, and the state’s average farm size is 838 acres.

The impacts of tariffs go beyond food markets.

Pfaltzgraff says: “The tariffs hurt farmers because we’re importing a lot of our inputs- the steel that makes our equipment, and the parts that we need for repairs, all of those are going to increase in price by 25% or more. We’re already faced with a negative position on the commodity market- we’re losing money as it is, and then for us to continue operations, it costs us even more money to do it.”

Pfaltzgraff wanted to remind people that most farmers live paycheck-to-paycheck, often working off-farm jobs. Farmers are also 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the wider public.

Pfaltzgraff is concerned that all of these policy changes will hollow out local farms. At the Trump Administration’s order, The USDA has discontinued two different programs that provide $13.1 million in funding for food banks and schools to purchase locally produced food. A move that has left many food banks and rural school districts scrambling to replace those sources of funding.