Sacramento farmer faces new uncertainty following President Trump's tariffs
SACRAMENTO — President Trump's tariffs and the new U.S. trade war have California farmers facing a new uncertainty.
Ray Yeung is a Sacramento County farmer. On Wednesday, he watched the work on one of his 3,000 acres as his crews prepared to plant safflower — one of the hundreds of crops now part of the U.S. trade war.
"We import a lot of safflower for safflower oil from Mexico," Yeung said. "Well, if they raise the tariffs on those guys, it's going to help us out."
While the U.S. now has a tariff on safflower imports from Mexico, Canada now has its own tariff on any safflower exports from the U.S., leaving the impact on Yeung's bottom line unknown.
President Trump flipped ten California counties in his recent election victory. Many were in rural and agricultural areas of the state.
The impact of the president's tariffs is now hitting farmers like Yeung with a sense of uncertainty.
UC Davis Professor Daniel Sumner is an expert in agriculture economics and points out that in Mr. Trump's first term in office, he granted farmers $28 billion in public subsidies following their losses from the then-U.S.-China trade war.
"So uncertainty is really bad for the economy, in general," Professor Sumner said. "So to the extent that you want to have an agriculture that depends, like we were 50 years ago, on handouts from the government, this is the way to do it."
Tab Berg is a Republican strategist who said that from a political perspective, Mr. Trump's new trade war is about more than the prices of products.
"It's also about the general trade agreements that we have the border security that we have, getting them to actually own up to their portion of the border control," Berg said.
For Yeung, the tariff uncertainty is now part of the grower's waiting game.
"It's all hope, but that's what makes it exciting it's like gambling," Yeung said.
Yeung has 3,000 acres of farmland in Sacramento and produces half a dozen crops. Some of it is sold to brokers that sell overseas, and some stay locally.
