We ignore the fact that efforts, like AGRA, have failed and we refuse to support and fund Agroecological solutions that will work.

Even before the war in Ukraine, the sanctions on Russia, and the shipping blockade of the Black Sea, farmers across the US were getting ready for higher prices on seed, fertilizer, and crop chemicals. All winter, major farm media was warning farmers to book supplies early as prices would be high and supplies would be short. The war in Ukraine has only amped up the concern among farmers, input suppliers, and those who erroneously proclaim that we, the US, must feed the world.

The farm media offers suggestions as to how farmers, despite relatively higher crop prices, might deal with the even steeper increase in input costs. Use less, get your old tillage equipment out or, heaven forbid, consider manually pulling weeds like farmers used to do—of course, years ago, farmers didn’t run thousands of acres.

While oil companies used the sanctions on Russian oil to steeply ramp up their prices, even though Russian oil continues to flow almost without interruption, corporate agribusiness also has a convenient smokescreen to ramp up input prices even further—nothing short of blatant corporate profiteering.