Contract chicken farmers reconsidering support of Trump after his administration rolled back rules protecting them - Entrepreneur Generations

Many of the nation's 25,000 contract chicken farmers voted for Donald Trump because they were disappointed in President Obama's failure to check the power of big meat processors, but now some say Trump isn't helping much either.

During Obama's tenure, "farmers complained that they had been lured into the business with rosy profit projections only to discover that the processing companies — which they depend on for supplies of chicks and feed — could suddenly change their contract terms to impose additional costs or drop them for any reason," Isaac Arnsdorf reports for ProPublica. The Obama administration did pass the rules meant to address those problems, but not until a month after the election.

Now, some farmers say they may have been mistaken to expect Trump would help them more than Obama. "Over the last two years, Trump appointees have not only reversed the regulations put in place at the end of Obama’s presidency, they have retreated from enforcing the preexisting rules," Arnsdorf reports. "The Trump administration dissolved the office charged with policing meat companies for cheating and defrauding farmers. Fines for breaking the rules dropped to $243,850 in 2018, less than 10% of what they were five years earlier."

The administration's support of big meat companies over small farmers highlights Trump's ties with the industry: he got a $2 million donation from a poultry magnate during the campaign and installed several industry insiders on the transition team or in the Agriculture Department, Arnsdorf reports.

"Chicken farmers who considered themselves staunch Trump supporters say their worsening circumstances since he took office are making them reconsider their votes," Arnsdorf reports. That includes Mike Weaver, a West Virginia farmer who gave up raising chickens after the company wanted him to waive his right to sue; the Obama administration's rules would have prevented that.

"I made excuses for [Trump] for a while, thinking he’s going to eventually get a grasp on the dire situation small family farmers are in," Weaver told Arnsdorf. "It hasn’t happened yet. If it doesn’t happen by the next election, I’m going to tell everybody some of the promises he made were never kept and I don’t see it changing."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2WRR3y5 Contract chicken farmers reconsidering support of Trump after his administration rolled back rules protecting them - Entrepreneur Generations

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