Author: Truth & Hammer

A private group announced Monday that it has constructed a half-mile wall along a section of the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico, in what it said was a first in the border debate. The 18-foot steel bollard wall is similar to the designs used by the Border Patrol, sealing off a part of the border that had been a striking gap in existing fencing, according to We Build the Wall, the group behind the new section. The section was also built faster and, organizers say, likely more cheaply than the government has been able to manage in recent years. Kris Kobach, a former secretary of state in Kansas and an informal immigration adviser to President Trump, says the New Mexico project has the president’s blessing and says local Border Patrol agents are eager to have the assistance. “We’re closing a gap that’s been a big headache for them,” said Mr. Kobach, who is general counsel for We Build the Wall. The announcement comes at a critical time for the border. Mr. Trump’s plans to build hundreds of miles of new and replacement wall took a hit late last week when a federal judge ordered a halt to part of his emergency declaration and shifting of money within the Pentagon to make up for Congress’s refusal to grant him the money he wanted. Judge Haywood Gilliam says the president can’t spend money when Congress has debated it and refused to approve it.

Enter We Build the Wall, which says, now that it’s proved it can build border wall, that it has eyes on other areas where private parties hold border lands and want to build barriers there to cut down on the illegal traffic across their property.The new wall begins at the Rio Grande and runs up to the lower elevations of Mount Cristo Rey. The wall on the Texas side ends at the river, and there used to be a gap on the New Mexico side running from the river over to Mount Cristo Rey. Two parking lots, one on the Mexican side and one on the U.S. side, with nothing but a ditch to separate them, offered a convenient staging point for would-be migrants.  Mr. Kobach says agents have told him perhaps 100 migrants a night cross — but the bigger problem is that they would cross, gaining agents’ attention, then drug smugglers would use the distraction to run drugs through elsewhere in the gap. A typical night could exceed $100,000 worth of drugs through the gap, Mr. Kobach said.

We Build the Wall made waves over the last six months as it used crowdfunding to raise money. Its campaign set a $1 billion goal and has raised more than $22 million from more than 265,000 pledges through GoFundMe. The group posted photos of the New Mexico section to the pledge page on Monday. “We did it,” the group said on Facebook.  Construction began Friday and will be completed Tuesday, Mr. Kobach said. Tommy Fisher’s Fisher Sand & Gravel did the construction. Mr. Fisher has been in the news recently with Mr. Trump suggesting repeatedly and publicly that the government should consider his outfit for future border wall construction. He was one of the contractors selected in 2017 to build wall prototypes in San Diego. None of those prototypes was deemed contract-worthy, and Congress has forbidden the Border Patrol from using any of those designs anyway. More recently Mr. Fisher announced he could build 234 miles of fencing at $1.4 billion — or about $6 million per mile. That’s about a quarter of the cost of Mr. Trump’s current fencing, which goes off at about $25 million per mile.

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Those are two words that are commonly used to stir up patriotic feelings. They are also words that can’t be taken for granted, because today nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities. When the stock market tanked during the past recession, foreign investors began buying up big swaths of U.S. farmland. And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign owned, it’s been left up to individual states to decide on any limitations. It’s likely that even more American land will end up in foreign hands, especially in states with no restrictions on ownership. With the median age of U.S. farmers at 55, many face retirement with no prospect of family members willing to take over. The National Young Farmers Coalition anticipates that two-thirds of the nation’s farmland will change hands in the next few decades. “Texas is kind of a free-for-all, so they don’t have a limit on how much land can be owned,” say’s Ohio Farm Bureau’s Ty Higgins. “You look at Iowa and they restrict it — no land in Iowa is owned by a foreign entity.” Ohio, like Texas, also has no restrictions, and nearly half a million acres of prime farmland are held by foreign-owned entities. In the northwestern corner of the state, below Toledo, companies from the Netherlands alone have purchased 64,000 acres for wind farms.

There are two counties in this region with the highest concentration of foreign-owned farmland — more than 41,000 acres each. One of those is Paulding County, where three wind farms straddle the Ohio-Indiana line. His other concern is that every acre of productive farmland that is converted over to something other than agriculture is an acre of land that no longer produces food. That loss is felt from the state level all the way down to rural communities, where one in six Ohioans has ties to agriculture. Angela Huffman is a sixth-generation farmer in Wyandot County, which, along with Paulding County, has more than 41,000 acres of foreign-owned farmland. Her modest, two-story white farmhouse has been in her family for almost 200 years. Her grandfather was the last person to actively farm the land here. When he got out of farming due to declining markets, none of his five children wanted to take over, and the cropland is now leased. But Huffman, a young millennial who lives here with her mother, wants to try to keep the farm going and revive her family heritage. Walking out to the barn, a huge white Great Pyrenees dog watches over a small flock of sheep. Huffman says she’s worried about the effects of foreign land ownership on her rural community — which she describes as similar to Walmart pushing local businesses out of the market.

“Right out my back door here, Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, has recently bought out a couple grain elevators,” Huffman says, pointing across the field behind her house, “basically extracting the wealth out of the community.” To be fair, U.S. farmers and corporations also invest in overseas agriculture, owning billions of dollars of farmland from Australia to Brazil, but the Smithfield Food buyout has really raised concerns with American farmers. As part of that 2013 sale, a Chinese company now owns 146,000 acres of prime U.S. farmland. Back in the Huffman farmhouse, Joe Maxwell is typing on a laptop at the kitchen table. Maxwell is a fourth-generation farmer from Missouri. He and Huffman are part of the Organization for Competitive Markets, an advocacy group of farmers and ranchers across the nation. Maxwell points to the Smithfield Foods elevators across the field: “The money that those elevators used to make stayed within the community. Today the money those elevators make will go into the pocket of someone thousands of thousands of miles away. This is going on across America.” Maxwell is concerned that, as other states put restrictions on foreign purchases in place, Ohio in particular is being targeted. “So when they’re looking for investments in the U.S. and agriculture,” he says, “Ohio’s a great ag state, and you don’t have any restrictions like other states.” Nationwide, Canadian investors own the most farmland. In Ohio, it’s Germany, with 71,000 acres.

On the southern central part of the state, John Trimmer manages 30,000 acres of corn and soybeans for German investors. He’s been working with German families that have wanted to get into U.S. agriculture since the 1980s. “They started to buy land in Iowa and Minnesota,” Trimmer explains, “but right when they started, [Iowa and Minnesota] passed state laws which restricted foreign ownership.” Instead, the Germans turned to Ohio. But, Trimmer says, there is a misconception about foreign owners — that they aren’t good neighbors or good stewards of the land. What he sees is a growing divide between older family members who still live on the farm, and their children who have no interest in the family business and want to cash out the land. “The last two farms we bought here, through an owner, her and her brothers and sisters inherited it from their mother, and none of them wanted to farm. None of them have an interest in the farm.” Trimmer explains that his German clients have established a reputation in the community for letting the tenants — often aging parents or grown children — continue to live in the houses on the farms they buy. Sellers work directly with his German clients — instead of putting the property up on the market, the sale ensures that family members can live out their lives in the family homestead, while still getting cash value for the farmland.

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