Let Them Eat Diamonds
American Agriculture, Winter Poetry, and Nazi Economics
Why Is No One Talking About Agriculture?
I remember a conversation I once had with a fellow jewelry salesperson — this was back in late 2012, a year (and world) that seems farther away than only 13 years ago. Whenever it was slow, when people just refused to buy jewelry, she would always say: “Well, people can’t eat diamonds.”
People can’t eat diamonds; people eat food.
For a nation whose founders envisioned an agrarian republic — no more so than Thomas Jefferson — it’s odd that, with all the happenings within and without the new administration, there’s been little talk towards or about agriculture. Even last week's confirmation of the new agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, didn’t seem to make much in the way of waves. In fact, she had one of the less pugilistic confirmations and was confirmed 72-28; even securing the unanimous approval of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry subcommittee (which includes 12 democrats and 11 republicans).1
All of that is to say what? That you probably didn’t know any of that until now. And that’s sort of the point.
We worry, and rightly so, over the price of eggs. Yet, we know and hear very little about the agricultural sector as a whole — or even in part. Nothing from the administration; nothing from the newsstatnd. In a kind of lowkey irony, I suspect I know as much about the latest goings-on in American agriculture as farmers themselves know about what to expect from the current administration.
And that is my point.
There’s been little talk of agriculture, and how it will or won’t fare, both by the administration and traditional — and coastal — media organizations. The results for “Trump on agriculture” are mostly from farmers or farmers' advocates. Some top results are even dated from Trump’s first administration. There’s been no real deep-dive, not even from within the administration, as to what the grower’s of the nation can expect throughout the next four years. Even this article on MSNBC, one such coastal media group, is by the president of the National Farmers Union. Most stories have cropped-up from regional, inland writers in places like Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas — states where agriculture plays a much larger role in the economy.2
While Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian republic is no more than field corn by 2025, America still has to eat. It still has to grow food. And what it doesn’t eat, it sells.
As part of the new administration's federal funding freeze an initial victim was America’s agricultural sector. The freeze, although it has since been amended, initially included a hold on farm subsidies — subsidies which, as of 2022, amounted to more than $15 billion dollars. Even the USAID shutdown, which has been greeted warmly by some in the country, has had a direct agricultural impact on the US; the global aid organization routinely purchased (to donate) more than $2 billion dollars of US agricultural products annually.
And this says nothing about the potential impact of retaliatory tariffs. The three biggest targets for our own tariffs (targets who are prepared to counter with their own) are Mexico, Canada, and China; the three nations whom the US relies on most in regards to agriculture exports.3 The only way to make American agricultural goods competitive in such a situation would be to offer, guess what, more subsidies to off-set the cost of the tariffs. For a demographic that solidly backed the current president in 2024, the administration's rather ad hoc approach to agriculture must come as a shock — especially since this is the president’s second time behind the Resolute desk.4
If it isn’t obvious by now, it’s clear food is an afterthought to the administration (and, in all fairness, to most Americans) outside of what goes on at the grocery store price-wise. Agricultural appointments mean nothing. Farm subsidies are frozen until, whoops, they aren’t. We close an agency that appears, at first blush, to be unconnected to the agricultural world until — whoops, again — it deletes a likely $2 billion dollar annual invoice made out to America’s farmers. We bandy about the idea of tariffs when so much of what we grow is exported and, if not even more subsidized to make-up for it, would demand a sector-wide shift to growing different products (be they farmed or raised) entirely.
It’s fun to say we “shoot first, ask questions later”, but it gets dicier when the bullets do real harm and undermine the livelihoods of real people living in the real world. While America may no longer be an agrarian republic, it must still feed itself and, in turn, feed a huge chunk of the world. And no matter how valuable a diamond may be, you still can’t eat it.
It wouldn’t be a 2025 newsletter without some new poetry, now would it? This poem was composed on our patio on February 8, 2025. It was partially inspired by this 17th century ballad.
The Strength of the Sword
Spark in smoothbore pan — (with frightening bayonet fixed)
Sends shot sizzling through air.
Fell Ares breeze flings arms
Fire and flesh fill the four corners;
Seven seas see squalls and
Success must be seized and secured.
Farm tools refashioned for use in a different field;
Flanders was just the first fist.
Searing visions slay unwilling Cassandras
Scarlet silks spill from Sebastopol to Santa Fe.
Fear not the foes you fight — (seek solace in the strength of the sword).
Cut/Paste
An Extract From Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction
I’ve been reading Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006), a monumental history on the creation and destruction of Nazi Germany’s economy. The work focuses primarily on the years 1933-1945, but spends enough time in the Weimar Republic to give everything that occurs after Hitler’s rise to power the necessary context. It’s a brilliant book and reads well despite it’s heavy dual subject matter: economics and Nazis.
Below is an extract from the book that I found impressive, shocking, unexpected (?) — and all for reasons I cannot immediately express. I hope those of you who make it down this deep into the newsletter will offer some insight and feedback; more importantly, your reflections, if any are to be had. The first paragraph is Tooze writing and the second is a pull-quote from a German tank manual:
Contemporaries were struck by the enthusiasm that greeted the reintroduction of conscription in the spring of 1935. And remarkable evidence collected by labour historians demonstrates the passionate identification that many German workers in the 1930s clearly felt with the weapons they were producing. This was no doubt in part due to the high status attached to the skilled work involved in armaments production. But it also had something to do with the weapons themselves. These were not ordinary commodities. They were assertions of national strength, the common property of the German nation, to be handled by the pick of German manhood. A tank manual issued during the war brought this connection forcefully to the attention of its youthful crew:
“For every shell you fire, your father has paid 100 Reichsmarks in taxes, your mother has worked for a week in the factory... The Tiger costs all told 800,000 Reichsmarks and 300,000 hours of labour. Thirty thousand people had to give an entire week's wages, 6,000 people worked for a week so that you can have a Tiger. Men of the Tiger, they all work for you. Think what you have in your hands!"5
No one is immune to propaganda, but the words “think what you have in your hands” struck me as deeply meaningful. We spend a lot of time wondering how to live our lives, what to do with the hours given to us. But, when we work or create, we’re usually holding something: a paint brush, a whisk, a keyboard, a smartphone, a scalpel, a gun. There is almost always something betwixt one’s meaty paws… and just think, for a moment, what you have in your hands!
For more details on the entire confirmation process, and to see who has voted for who, check out Ballotpedia.
The top 10 agriculture-producing states in terms of crop and animal/product cash receipts in 2023 are (in descending order): California, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, Indiana, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Mexico is our largest agricultural trading partner in terms of total exports and imports; Canada is a close second; and China is one of our nation’s top agricultural trade partners and an important soybean importer. For more statistics, visit the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
More than 77% of farming counties in 2024 voted in favor of Trump. In regards to Trump's first presidency: “During Trump’s first-term trade war, China imported fewer soybeans from the United States as it turned to other countries, including Brazil, which emerged as China’s primary soybean supplier. Much of that business didn’t return to U.S. farmers once the trade war ended.” Quote from The Gazette.
As an aside, there is only one operable Tiger tank in existance (as of 2025) and it currently resides in Dorset, England.