U.S. farmers support trade at NAFTA discussions

Jan 29, 2018

Representatives from Farmers for Free Trade attended discussions in Montreal

By Diego Flammini
News Reporter
Farms.com

American farmers and NAFTA supporters are in Montreal, Que. to show their support for trade agreements.

“We would like to see the United States aggressively enter into new trade agreements,” Brian Kuehl, executive director of Farmers for Free Trade, an organization dedicated to expanding opportunities for American farmers, said. “We feel very strongly that U.S. agriculture wins when U.S. agriculture can compete. And we can only compete fairly if we have trade agreements.”

At least 10 U.S. states export more than 20 per cent of all their agricultural goods to Mexico and Canada, according to the group.

The United States has already pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If the country abandons NAFTA, future ag exports could be at risk even further.

“If you look at Texas exports, after China, Mexico is number two in most of those categories,” Scott Frazier, a grain and cattle farmer from Texas associated with Farmers for Free Trade, told reporters during a Friday conference call. “If you take out our number one and number two players, that doesn’t give us many folks to trade with.”

And the timing in which government officials complete these NAFTA negotiations is also of critical importance.

The longer the discussions take, the more opportunities U.S. ag importers have to consider other suppliers.

“Uncertainty is costly,” Darci Vetter, a senior adviser for Farmers for Free Trade and former Chief U.S. Agriculture Negotiator, said during the conference call. “The longer we go without having clarity about the strength of that (trade) relationship with our partners, the more we provide an incentive for those partners to look elsewhere.”

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.