Government shutdown, trade wars hit farmers’ bottom line hard

Government shutdown, trade wars hit farmers’ bottom line hard

For Wendy Johnson, a livestock and organic grain farmer in Charles City, Iowa, October is usually the time she visits her local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office.

There, she sits down with one of their employees and goes over the practices she implemented on her farm over the past year, along with documentation that proves she met the requirements of whichever U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) contract she was operating under. Once that’s done, she gets paid for the work she did.

But this October was no normal year for Johnson and thousands of other farmers who rely on USDA contracts to operate their farms.

That’s because of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which started on Oct. 1 and d