Harvesting Our Own Food Supply

Growing up on our family farm and ranch, there were two time periods that were busiest: calving season in the spring and harvest in the fall. The time has come for farmers to harvest most of their crops. It’s the fruit of their labor after a long growing season.

If farmers see good rainfall and fair weather, hopefully they have a strong harvest. If not, they pray for a better year next year. Unfortunately, many estimates show that 2024 will be one of the biggest drops in farm income on record due to drought in some parts of the country, severe storms in others (including here in South Dakota), and low commodity prices. I have worked on ag policy for 30 years – but this has been a hard year.

To make matters harder, that decline in farm income comes as prices remain persistently high for the basic necessities in life, like food, gasoline, and electricity. Farmers have to take care of their own families, too. And when farmers have smaller harvests, that means that the cost of those crops goes up at the grocery store.

Now more than ever, we need to thank our farmers for the work that they do, and we need to support them. They grow our food – we would be lost without them.

For that reason, I have made taking care of our ag producers a top priority as Governor of South Dakota. We’ve worked on numerous new laws and other actions to preserve agriculture for our next generation. We celebrate all our family farms, especially when they reach 100 years or more of ownership in the same family.

This past year, South Dakota passed the best bill in the nation to keep the Chinese Communist Party and other Evil Foreign Governments from owning our state’s precious farm land. China would never allow us to buy land in their country – they don’t even let their own people buy their land. We should not allow our enemies to become our neighbors.

I hope that other states follow our example. After all, South Dakota is just one state out of 50. Since passing that legislation, we just received our first report from my Department of Revenue, and there were no attempted purchases of ag land by Evil Foreign Governments in South Dakota. But we know that it is happening in other places. China’s ownership of American ag land grew by more than 5,300% in just a 10-year period.

And this threat is taking on emerging forms. Water rights have increasingly become an issue as foreign countries have attempted to lease American farmland as a means of stealing our water. And Russia has been buying American cattle to bolster its own beef production with our superior cattle genetics. They want to be competitive with our own beef industry. If they succeed, they will make it much tougher for us to maintain control of our own food supply. As I have said many times, our enemies – especially China – are attempting to infiltrate every aspect of our way of life.

As long as America can feed itself, we control our own destiny. Food security is a matter of national security. We need a strong and diversified food supply, and we must not rely on other nations – much less nations that hate us – to provide our food.

So we need our farmers. We need them to do well, to keep their farms in business, and to continue growing and raising the food that we enjoy on our dinner tables every night. I pray that our farmers enjoy a fantastic harvest. And I will keep doing everything in my power to guarantee their ability to grow our food for years to come.