the lost markets.
“As farmers, we had developed a market with China,” he said. “We need trading partners. It’s simple supply and demand. I’m very frustrated with our administration because despite the fact China is known to play dirty, specifically with intellectual property theft and such, that’s really, unfortunately, not my concern.”
Stafslien added this his concern “is feeding my kids. And I think there were methods to deal with China other than this brute force tactic that doesn’t seem to be working.”
Bob Kuylen, a wheat farmer, expressed a similar sentiment, recently
telling Yahoo Finance: “This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president, and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets.”
“All these countries went to different countries to get their grain,” he added. “How are we going to get the relations back with them to buy our grain again and be our customers?”
Although Ziesch is frustrated by all of these challenges, her feelings are tied more to a lack of understanding from the general public rather than the political climate.
“It’s just the feeling of being under-appreciated and maybe misunderstood [about] the work that goes into farming and raising food for the world, that we’re just a blip on the map because we’re only 2% of the population,” she said.