A Sacramento farmer is sounding the alarm over just how bad his year has been.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ray Yeung has been farming for 40 years in Sacramento, and his father farmed the land before him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeung wrote a letter to President Trump on Dec. 2, explaining the challenges he is facing after a year he thought would be good.<\/p>\n
“It’s hard to say exactly what happened,” Yeung said. “It’s the worst ever. It’s the worst ever because we’re getting the same price as my dad got in the 1970s \u2014 and at that point, my dad was paying 50 cents a gallon for diesel, was paying two dollars for wages, everything was just less expensive back then.”<\/p>\n
Yeung’s letter to the president detailed his concern over record-high wages and record-low prices, leading to what he describes as real food insecurity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s mathematically impossible to even break even,” Yeung said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
UC Davis Professor of Agricultural Economics Dan Sumner says a mix of factors, including a surplus of supply for some crops, tariff uncertainty for others, is creating problems for some farmers across the country.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot going on,” Professor Sumner said. “The best year in history for the beef industry, the worst year that anyone can remember for the wine grape industry, and the others are somewhere in between.”<\/p>\n
Days after Yeung sent his letter, the Trump administration is releasing new federal farm aid.<\/p>\n
For Yeung, it’s not a matter of celebrating \u2014 it could help his survival.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We’re going to use it to pay fertilizer bills and tractor payments, we’re not going to go to Disneyland,” Yeung said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeung has 2,500 acres of farmland he leases in Sacramento County.<\/p>\n
He says he will likely give some of it up because he won’t be able to afford to farm it all next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Sacramento farmer is sounding the alarm over just how bad his year has been.\u00a0 Ray Yeung has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[11159,121,123,122],"class_list":{"0":"post-87822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-farmers","9":"tag-sacramento","10":"tag-sacramento-headlines","11":"tag-sacramento-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}