How Trump's Tariffs Are Impacting U.S. Farmers
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.5 • 24.9K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Asma Khalid, and national correspondent Kirk Siegler.
The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Jack, and I'm at the first St. John's Literary Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, |
| 0:08.0 | where I just gave a presentation on Carl McGee, the newspaper editor who cracked the Teapot Dome scandal 100 years ago. |
| 0:17.0 | This podcast was recorded at... |
| 0:19.3 | 105 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, March 20th. |
| 0:23.5 | Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Here's the show. |
| 0:31.0 | Wow. Here is the show. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the White House. |
| 0:40.6 | And NPR's Kirk Seagler is with us from Boise. Hey, Kirk. Hello, guys. You're with us because the impact of the Trump administration's tariffs is already being felt in certain parts of the country, especially with commodity farmers. |
| 0:55.6 | Kirk, you were just in North Dakota. It's a state that's deeply Republican. What are you hearing |
| 1:00.8 | from farmers there about challenges that they're running into now? More than 67 percent of |
| 1:07.7 | North Dakota's electorate went for President Trump. |
| 1:15.4 | And farmers are anxious, I think, if you could sum it up in one word. |
| 1:20.1 | For some context, just to step back for a second, you mentioned commodity crops. |
| 1:22.5 | Well, commodity crop prices are already low. |
| 1:37.6 | And inflation is up or still, you know, relatively high, meaning prices are high for everything, for inputs, i.e., that means in the farm world, fertilizer and other things that are needed to grow crops in the fields. |
| 1:41.4 | And farmers are coming into this spring planting season with a lot of uncertainties. |
| 1:45.3 | And then on top of that is a looming trade war. So basically what they can sell it for is down. But what it costs to grow is up. |
| 1:52.9 | Exactly. And the entire U.S. agriculture system, or a lot of it, is really geared toward exports. |
| 2:01.4 | And in particular, I was visiting in North Dakota with soybean growers, more than half |
| 2:06.9 | in a lot of counties of North Dakota, of all the soybeans grown, are shipped by rail to the |
| 2:12.8 | Pacific Northwest and then sent overseas to China. |
| 2:17.1 | And that market is now totally up in the air. Wow. So, Asma, |
| 2:21.7 | you follow the tariffs a little bit more closely than I do. And I will say I am confused because it is so on again, off again with the tariff announcements that I don't really know where things stand. So are there currently |
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