Local Farmer Bob Krueger Warns Of "Perfect Storm" From Federal Tariffs And Water Policy

WAUKESHA — I spent 34 years with the Department of Public Works before I retired in 2019 and went back to running the 200 acres off Big Bend Road that's been in my wife's family since 1961. Corn and soybeans, mostly, with about 40 acres in alfalfa I rotate through for a neighbor's dairy herd. I bring up the DPW work because it's where I learned to read a budget line by line, and lately I've been reading two federal policy lines that have nothing to do with each other on paper and everything to do with each other on my cost sheet. One is a tariff. The other is a water order signed 1,500 miles from this farm. Together they're the closest thing to a perfect storm I've seen heading into a harvest since I started keeping my own books.

I want to be careful here, because "perfect storm" gets used for every mildly inconvenient news cycle now, and I don't like cheapening the phrase. But when two unrelated federal actions land in the same six weeks and both point at the same number on my spreadsheet, tighter margins on this year's crop, I think the phrase earns its keep.

The Tariff Side Of The Ledger

The new U.S. tariff on Canadian goods doesn't say "farm" anywhere in it, but a meaningful share of the potash that goes into the fertilizer I spread every spring comes across that same border, and my co-op's pricing sheet for next season already reflects it. My fertilizer rep, Curt Loomis at the Big Bend co-op, put it plainly when I asked him last week: "I can't tell you the exact number yet, but I can tell you it's not going down." Equipment parts are the other line item. My combine is a 2016, and the sensor module I had to replace in June came in almost 20 percent higher than the same part cost two years ago, largely because it's assembled with Canadian steel components. None of this is dramatic on its own. All of it adds up before a single bushel leaves the field.

The Water Order From Two Time Zones Away

The second piece is a federal order requiring 1.25 million acre-feet in annual water-usage reductions across Western agricultural districts, mostly aimed at Colorado River allocations that don't touch Wisconsin at all. I don't irrigate off the Colorado River. Nobody in Waukesha County does. But a meaningful share of the country's produce and forage crops come out of the districts absorbing that cut, and when Western output tightens, commodity markets don't stay regional, they reprice nationally. My grain elevator contact, Route 59 Grain's Del Anders, told me the futures board has already been "twitchy" since the order was announced in July. Twitchy is not a word I like to hear from a man who has watched that board for 22 years.

"The hits keep coming. Federal policy makers should understand that it's all connected, and right now, the connections are painful."

— Bob Krueger, retired Waukesha DPW supervisor and farmer

What "Tighter Margins" Actually Means On 200 Acres

I ran the numbers three different ways last weekend at my kitchen table, the same way I used to run DPW budget projections, and every version comes out the same: a smaller cushion than last year, not a disaster, but not nothing either. On 200 acres, a fertilizer increase in the range Curt described works out to real money before I've sold a single bushel, and that's before whatever the elevator price does between now and when my corn actually comes off the field in late September. My neighbor Ron Pergande, who farms 140 acres two roads over, told me he's already delaying a decision on a used grain cart he'd planned to buy this fall. "You don't make big equipment decisions when you don't know what the fall price is going to look like," he said. "You just wait and hope October tells you something September didn't."

What I'm Actually Asking For

I'm not asking Washington to undo the tariff or the water order. I understand both have justifications that have nothing to do with a corn farm off Big Bend Road, and I'm not in a position to weigh a border-steel tariff against a Colorado River allocation fight. What I am asking is that the people writing this policy do it with an understanding that a Midwest grain farm doesn't experience these decisions as separate line items on separate days. We experience them as one number, tighter, in the same season. If that's the tradeoff the country has decided on, fine. But somebody should say so plainly instead of letting two federal actions land on the same harvest and calling it a coincidence.

I'll finish the harvest either way. I always have. But I spent 34 years reading budgets for a living, and I know the difference between a bad year and a year where two unrelated bad decisions happened to arrive in the same envelope. This is the second kind, and farmers in this county deserve to hear that acknowledged before the next planting season, not after it.