CULBERTSON—March is National Agriculture Month, with National Agriculture Day falling on March 18.
The proclamation is meant to recognize and celebrate US producers and underscore the importance of the national food system.
But tariffs, trade wars and a lull in global grain markets are leaving Montana farmers like Grant Salvevold feeling uncertain about the future of his industry.
"Right now, a lot of the uncertainty just leads to who we can ship to with all the tariffs going on, what countries are taking exports and importing," Salvevold said. "Some markets are getting shut off right now and without those, there's just not a lot of competition to move stuff around."
Salvevold is a fourth-generation farmer who works his family's 17,000 acre farm near Froid, in the far northeastern part of Montana.
While Salvevold's farm has long grown wheat, poor markets are driving him to make different planting decisions this year.
"Specialty crops, lentils, peas, they're kind of leading the way right now," Salvevold said. "We grew up raising wheat—that was our staple and now it's kind of do anything you can not to plant wheat."
Salvevold is not alone in straying away from wheat this season. Down the road at the 20,000-acre Nygard farm in Brockton, John Nygard says his family too is planting less wheat due to costs of inputs like fertilizer and the low price of dollar-per-bushel.
"This year we're doing mostly specialty crops, it's cheaper to do specialty crops," Nygard said.
Jason Boeshore manages a grain elevator in Culberston and follows commodity markets closely in order to advise farmers when to sell their products for the best price.
"What I'm hearing from farmers is a lot of uncertainty," Boeshore said. "They ask me, 'hey, Jason, what's gonna happen? What's my new crop wheat gonna be worth?' And this is one of the first times in my career I don't know what to tell them."
Boeshore says the price of wheat started dropping steadily about three years ago, driven by inflation and decreasing demand.
"A majority of the wheat that's grown in the United States, and Montana falls into that category, goes to Southeast Asia, they're our biggest customers. So when the dollar goes up, countries that are not doing well financially can no longer afford to buy our goods," Boeshore said.
The recent addition of tariffs and trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and China have hurt the market as well.
"The number three buyer of US wheat is Mexico, our neighbors to the south. So with tumult in trade agreements and obviously an increase in inflation, it's going to make it more difficult for them to source our goods," Boeshore said.
According to the White House, a new round of tariffs on imports from US trade partners Canada and Mexico are set to take effect on April 2. Canada has pledged reciprocal tariffs on US imports. Earlier this month, China imposed a new set of reciprocal import tariffs on US agricultural products and food, including a 15 percent tariff on wheat imports.
China is the largest market for US agricultural products and Boeshore says losing a foothold in China and southeast Asia could allow other countries to take a bigger piece of the market.
" Australia, South America, France. The Black Sea, Russia/Ukraine—the war hasn't slowed them down that much," Boeshore said. "The Southeast Asian wheat buyers will get their wheat from one of those places."
For Salvevold, moving wheat isn't the only obstacle—cancelled foreign aid distribution has also hurt sales of lentils and peas.
"We work on a global market. Everything we do, very little of it stays in the US. Most of it is shipped as foreign aid," Salvevold said. "So all these markets that we like to work with, if they're shut off from us, we don't really have a lot of open markets we can go look for."
As trade negotiations continue, Boeshore and Salvevold share the feeling that farmers are not a big enough part of the conversation.
" I would doubt that the farmer is really heard or represented," Salvevold said. "Right now, we're probably working more on cars, computers, vehicles, and the farmer usually trickles in on the tail end of most of those conversations."
"Any attention that is being paid to it on the Hill is not being communicated back to us, back to the grain men and the farmers on the ground actually physically participating in these markets that are loading the rail cars that are driving the combines," Boeshore said. "[The delegation] could be beating down the doors in Washington DC but unless we can see it and we can hear it, it doesn't mean anything."
For Salvevold, he would like to see the prices of wheat improve, so he can again plant the crop that long defined his family farm.
"It'd be fun to go back to planting wheat as our primary crops, we just need some more support."
