You might recall in the wake of Donald Trump’s first inauguration how POTUS, angry about discussion over the size of his swearing-in crowd, trotted out press secretary Sean Spicer to set the record straight.
Spicer dressed down the media, saying it was engaging “in deliberately false reporting,” and the facts indicated that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
For his part, the POTUS declared “It looked like a million-and-a-half people … it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”
Never mind that aerial images and metro ridership statistics, suggested that the crowd size was significantly smaller than claimed .
A few days later, Trump confidant Kellyanne Conway was asked to provide context for Spicer’s claims on Meet The Press. In a heated back and forth with host Chuck Todd, Conway suggested don’t believe what your lying eyes are telling you, believe us…and introduced the world to “alternative facts.”
Shades of George Orwell’s “1984.” Ever since that day, POTUS has blurred the boundaries between facts, opinions, perspectives and lies for political gain.
There are hundreds of examples. For example, the day Trump doctored a map produced by the National Hurricane Center with a sharpie marker to change the track of Hurricane Dorian.
Alternative facts are a hallmark of the Trump presidency. And since regaining the White House, the Trump administration has increasingly run roughshod over facts and truth that get in the way of policy goals.
Distort the facts? Cook the numbers? Fire the messenger? Pretend climate change doesn’t exist? Yes, yes, yes and heck yes.
It’s dizzying.
For the White House, statistics are political weapons. Trumpet those you like. Manipulate or kill the ones you don’t. Gaslight the public as needed.
Which takes me to agricultural numbers. It goes without saying that the business of U.S. agriculture runs on statistics, many produced by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. NASS is the nation’s boots on the ground, preparing hundreds of reports on every aspect of agriculture including production and supply, farm finances, labor and wages, chemical use, and demographics of the workforce to name just a few.
Already this year, the White House has dipped its foot into messing with the numbers. In May, it blocked public consumption of the written analysis normally attached to the quarterly Agricultural Trade Forecast. The report shows a projected trade deficit of $49.5 billion dollars. The missing analysis would have shed light on how USDA arrived at its projection. That analysis still hasn’t been released to the public, and I doubt it will.
Needless to say the missing analysis set off alarms all across U.S. agriculture, causing the industry to brace itself for potential political monkeyshines in reports it has trusted for decades. Lose trust and it might be near impossible to make accurate projections on the value of agricultural products.
Take corn, for example. Right now, lots of corn farmers in the U.S. might lose money marketing their 2025 crop.
A few weeks ago, NASS forecast corn yield “at a record high 188.8 bushels per acre, up 9.5 bushels from last year. NASS also forecasts record high yields in Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.”
Those numbers were deemed unbelievable by many market analysts. Making it even tougher for farmers to swallow was all that corn is expected to push ending stocks to a jaw dropping 2.117 billion bushels. Off those numbers, USDA lowered by 30 cents a bushel the average season-average corn price received by producers to $3.90.
That’s well under the cost of planting a corn crop in 2025 for many producers. You can bet if those statistics don’t change through the balance of the growing season or marketing year, farmers without revenue protection insurance will be screaming to lawmakers for help.
But what if the White House feels pressure from farmers over those crazy high NASS August corn projections? Would it be willing to conveniently lower yield? Would it increase demand beyond what might be reasonably expected? Just to appease folk in the White House political base? That fact that I can’t unequivocally say no is disconcerting. And you can bet the agricultural industry is wondering the same thing.
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