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With farm bankruptcies rising and agricultural debt loads soaring, the U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a bill that will make it easier for more farmers with larger amounts of debt to file for bankruptcy protection, Reuters reported. The bipartisan bill — H.R. 2336, the "Family Farmer Relief Act of 2019" — raises the ceiling on how much debt producers who file for chapter 12 bankruptcy can have, to $10 million from the previous $4 million. It costs far more now to run a U.S. farm than it did 30 years ago, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Without this change to the law, bankruptcy experts say, farmers whose debts exceed $4.15 million are forced to use chapter 11 protection, which is more costly and onerous. ABI testified in support of the bill. A Reuters analysis of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation data found that — after years of building up their farm lending portfolios in the wake of the U.S. housing meltdown of the late 2000s — top Wall Street banks are now pulling back from the sector as farm incomes are falling and farm loan delinquency rates are rising. Read more. 

In addition to the Family Farmer Relief Act, the Senate on Thursday also passed H.R. 3311, the Small Business Reorganization Act; H.R. 2938, the Honoring American Veterans in Extreme Need Act (HAVEN Act); and H.R. 3304, the National Guard and Reservist Debt Relief Extension Act. ABI testified in support of H.R. 2938, H.R. 3311 and H.R. 2336. All the bills passed the U.S. House of Representatives and are non-controversial. The bills received unanimous consent to proceed to passage. The legislation will now be sent to President Trump to be signed into law. Click here to read ABI’s press release. 

The Trump administration last week revealed details of a $16 billion aid package for farmers hit in the U.S.-China trade war, with key provisions meant to avoid large corporations scooping up big payouts at the expense of small farmers. According to a report released yesterday by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG), most of the $8.4 billion given out so far in last year’s farm bailout went to wealthy farmers, exacerbating the economic disparity with smaller farmers, the Washington Post reported. An EWG analysis found that the top one-tenth of recipients received 54 percent of all payments. Eighty-two farmers have so far received more than $500,000 in trade relief. The top 1 percent of recipients of trade relief received, on average, $183,331. The bottom 80 percent received, on average, less than $5,000, EWG said. The Agriculture Department said that the program is designed to provide a level of support that’s proportionate to a farm’s size and success. Read more.

The Family Farmer Relief Act (H.R. 2336), which would raise the debt limit for chapter 12 filings from $4.3 million to $10 million, passed the House of Representatives last week along with the Small Business Reorganization Act (H.R. 3311), the Honoring American Veterans in Extreme Need Act (H.R. 2938; HAVEN Act) and the National Guard and Reservist Debt Relief Extension Act (H.R. 3304). All the bills are non-controversial and ABI testified in support of H.R. 3311, H.R. 2336 and H.R. 2938.

The bills need unanimous consent to proceed to passage. According to Senate sources, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has a legislative hold on all bills at this time. The Senate is due to recess at the end of this week until September.

The wettest year in memory has stalled planting and stunted crops in the U.S. Midwest at a time when farmers are already struggling with low prices and a trade war with China, Bloomberg News reported. But they’re not alone. The communities they live in and the businesses that supply them with seeds, fertilizer, equipment and services are struggling as credit conditions steadily deteriorate in a fragile rural economy. The wet weather is presenting farmers with other purchasing dilemmas. Growers are weighing whether to trade up to the latest technology to protect crops and businesses, or use prior versions, according to Mark Patrick, chief financial officer of agro-chemical giant Syngenta AG. The fertilizer business is already feeling the effects. Midwest urea premiums have been running at more than double normal levels. While that’s good news for suppliers, the reason behind the price surge isn’t. With the Mississippi River closed for much of the past month, the regular flow of crop-nutrient shipments has been disrupted with barges stacked up waiting to move, according to Alexis Maxwell, research director for Bloomberg Green Markets.

Millions of farm acres are set to go unplanted with corn this spring as persistent wet weather leaves U.S. farmers facing an agonizing choice: whether or not to risk trying to raise a crop, the Wall Street Journal reported. Heavy, repeated rains over the past two months have left fields saturated throughout the critical planting period for corn, typically the biggest U.S. crop by acreage. Farmers in rain-soaked states now must decide whether to file insurance claims on unplanted fields (potentially making less money off their farms), switch to less-profitable crops or take their chances sowing corn that may not have time to fully mature. The inclement weather adds another challenge to a punishing period for farmers, seed and chemical suppliers, and tractor makers. Trade disputes with major U.S. food importers including Mexico and China have cut into crop prices, adding pressure to farm incomes, after several years of bumper harvests swelled global grain supplies.

For the past five years, the 18 states that produce the majority of the U.S. corn crop had an average of 90 percent of their fields planted by the end of May, according to data released on Tuesday by the Agriculture Department. At the same point this year, 58 percent of the corn crop is in the ground, the Washington Post reported. The outlook for soybeans is just as dismal, with 29 percent in the ground compared with 66 percent in years past. In individual states, the gap is even more severe. Just 22 percent of the corn crop had been planted as of May 26 in Indiana. Soybeans stood at 11 percent. “Week after week, farmers haven’t been able to get out in the fields to plant corn and soybeans,” said John Newton, chief economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, noting that this was the worst planting day on record since the USDA began tracking such data in the 1980s. “The frequency of these disasters, I can’t say we’ve experienced anything like this since I’ve been working in agriculture.” From the Rocky Mountains to the Ohio River Valley, millions of Midwesterners have endured unremitting rainfall, hundreds of dangerous tornadoes and debilitating flooding brought on by swollen waterways that are spilling into already saturated grounds — much of it farmland. The Senate voted last week to approve a multibillion-dollar aid package for communities nationwide that have been hit by natural disasters, including those affected by hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the South, wildfires on the West Coast and the flooding that continues to inundate those in the Midwest. The House’s version of the bill is being held up by Republicans who want it to include funding for Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The House is expected to vote on the measure next week.

U.S. dairy farmers that have seen an unprecedented number of bankruptcies in some parts of the country are looking closely at what sort of boost they may get from the Trump administration’s trade aid package, Bloomberg News reported. Retaliatory tariffs have robbed dairies of around $2 billion, said Beth Ford, the chief executive officer at Land O’Lakes Inc. Meanwhile, banks are de-risking their dairy portfolios, and operating loans have become harder to get, Ford said. U.S. farmers generally are struggling to remain afloat as the tariffs spat with China plays out. Dairy exports to China, once a fast-growing market, fell by more than 40 percent in the first quarter of 2019, according to the U.S. Dairy Export Council. Meanwhile, dairy farmers only got about $250 million in the first round of government payouts, according to Ford. “What do farmers want? They want trade. Nobody wants a payment,” Ford said. “If they have to have an interim payment, they would like something more reflecting the loss in the market that hit them.”

Stalled trade talks between Beijing and Washington are exacerbating a slump in the U.S. Farm Belt, and few farmers believe an aid package being assembled by the Trump administration will be enough to compensate them for the economic damage, the Wall Street Journal reported. Agriculture has been among the U.S. economic sectors hit hardest by the year-long trade conflict with China. Now that a deal has slipped from the grasp of negotiators, farmers are facing the likelihood that the deepest downturn in the agricultural economy since the 1980s could be prolonged. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in the absence of a deal, is cobbling together a farm-relief program that will total somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion, according to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. This is the second such aid package since the trade fight began. Many farmers doubt that the scale of that aid package is anywhere near sufficient to make up for a trade spat that has shut them out of a lucrative Chinese market of 1.4 billion consumers.