There are some lectures that stick with a student long after the grades have been turned in.
“The reason I survived and became a respected voice is I didn’t tell them what to do. I discussed the alternatives with them, the consequences, and they decided what to do,” Barry Flinchbaugh, a Kansas State University agricultural economist and professor emeritus, once said.
Flinchbaugh, who died in 2020, was not only an economist and agricultural policy expert who influenced decades of state and federal policy, but he was also an educator who didn’t stop teaching outside of the lecture hall. The Barry Flinchbaugh Center for Ag and Food Policy was created by alumni, colleagues, family and friends in 2023 to pass along his values of nonpartisan, transparent conversations.
To that end, the center launched the inaugural Flinchbaugh Forum on Sept. 26 in Manhattan, Kan., gathering industry leaders, academics, consumers and policymakers to explore policy alternatives and consequences.
Two panelists with decades of experience of working with Flinchbaugh on agricultural policy topics, and who’d benefited themselves from his “alternatives and consequences” counsel over the years, were former U.S. Secretaries of Agriculture Dan Glickman and Mike Johanns. During the Flinchbaugh Forum, they offered a master class in the alternatives and consequences of today’s agricultural policy.
Brazilian competition in China
Johanns first visited Brazil in the 1990s as governor of Nebraska. He saw that once the country addressed its transportation infrastructure problems, it would be a major player in the global commodities markets.
“What I saw in the last 18 months doesn’t compare to what I saw years ago,” he says. “They aren’t done growing, and they have great opportunities for growth without tearing out the Amazon. They have hectares and hectares of grassland to turn into productive farmland.”
Second, Johanns notes that Brazilians consider China as a business partner, and unlike the U.S., they aren’t interested in engaging in the political conversations over China’s human rights violations.
“They will say that it is not their role to tell China how to run their country, and they look at this as an opportunity to build a relationship to sell soybeans and continue growing their corn industry, too,” Johanns says. “The reality is, in places like Brazil and Argentina they are growing their agricultural economy, and it’s having a profound impact on us.”
Bipartisanship and compromise
“[Sen. Pat] Roberts, [Sen. Robert] Dole, Flinchbaugh and a little of myself, to a large extent, we ran a big part of national agricultural policy in the 1980s and 1990s,” Glickman says. “We respected each other, trusted each other, had a good relationship across the aisle. You can’t get this stuff done being a bully or putting up walls, especially in agriculture, where most people live in urban areas.”
The biggest challenge Glickman sees today is that politicians can’t seem to collaborate on bipartisan issues like food and agriculture.
“We can’t seem to get together to solve problems,” he says. “Something is wrong. Agriculture was the most bipartisan issue that Congress ever dealt with unless there was some sort of national emergency, and it’s not that way [today].”
Agriculture, he says, will continue to suffer without a collaborative, bipartisan approach that Flinchbaugh taught and advocated for his entire career.
SNAP in the farm bill
Flinchbaugh taught that decoupling the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from the farm bill was unwise because a bipartisan coalition of urban and rural interests was needed to get the votes to pass it. However, Johanns says, the recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act got critical farm program concessions passed — some say at the cost of those nutrition programs.
“I think the GOP looked at this and said they’ve been trying for years to get a farm bill passed and couldn’t get anywhere, and this was the train leaving the station, and they needed to get as much done for agriculture or they’d be stuck watching the train leave,” Johanns says. “To their credit, we got on the train, and reference prices are up, there’s better treatment for crop insurance. Significant things happened for agriculture, but it created very hard feelings on the other side.”
That historic coalition, he says, may disappear, and that will make it even tougher to get a farm bill over the finish line.
“No neighbor ever came up to me and said, ‘I pray for the day I can farm for the government,’” Johanns says. “Food security is national security. That is a very important point we need to make — to make sure this coalition is as broad as we can get it.”
He challenged those in the room to insist their senators and representatives rebuild those relationships and that coalition.
Tariffs and trade
In Johann’s confirmation hearings, he recalls being asked if he was going to be sitting at the table during trade negotiations or be an innocent bystander watching U.S. agricultural interests being negotiated away.
“For me, that’s the biggest issue here,” he says. “I’m not going to argue for one minute that there weren’t problems, and President [Donald] Trump saw those problems and said we’re going to fix those problems. … But at the end of all this, when the dust finally settles and we’ve signed off on agreements with whoever — hopefully everybody out there — I don’t want ag to be the innocent bystanders because it happens.”
Glickman agrees that industries like steel, auto, textiles and others have been in terrible trade situations, and compounding the issue is that these are located in urban areas where people may not blink at retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural commodities because it doesn’t immediately impact them.
However, there are political consequences in addition to economic ones, Glickman warns.
“The tariff policies are just terrible,” he says. “They’re ridiculous. They’ve created uncertainty in this country.”
He questions Congress’ abdication of its constitutional power over tariffs to the executive branch.
“In the case of agricultural products, we rely more than any other sector of the American economy on the ability to export our products, and it’s hurting us,” Glickman says. “And the voice of agriculture needs to grow louder on this. And Congress needs to exercise its legitimate constitutional bipartisan authority.
“There are a lot of disparate powers in the world that have a lot of economic strength, and we can’t disengage from the rest of the world,” he adds. “It’s not good for the security of the world. It’s not good for freedom and peace.”
The Dole-McGovern Food for Peace program was not only a way to use farmer surpluses, but also a way for the U.S. to be a leader in the world. Without that, Glickman says, China and other countries will fill that gap.
Health initiatives
“I have enormous concerns. I just don’t get it,” Johanns says. “Products that are a part of what you do every day, have been studied and analyzed and tested over and over again, now all of a sudden are called into question from a safety standpoint? My greatest concern is we will de-stabilize the attitude of consumers toward a whole array of products: beef, corn, pork, soybeans, maybe medical tools.”
He adds that both he and Glickman have been great advocates for more investment in science, and the thought of de-stabilizing public trust in science to address diseases and other challenges has very dangerous consequences.
Glickman agreed with Johanns, noting that the use of crop protection inputs and other tools as the scapegoat for U.S. issues with chronic disease and diet problems is not based on good science and is only going to confuse people without addressing the real problems.
“The fastest-growing part of the federal budget is treating chronic diseases in the Medicare budget,” Glickman says. “We spend $200 billion a year on diabetes and chronic diseases. America’s health is an important thing we should talk about.”
However, it is a complex issue that requires more complex solutions, he adds.
The two former secretaries of agriculture say that the U.S. still has a role to play in feeding hungry people all over the world, and to do so in a way that helps American farmers come out on top. They say if there was anything they learned from their time collaborating with Flinchbaugh, it’s that there are alternatives and consequences to every move in policy.
But taking the time to discuss those with partners across the aisle, to get farm policy right so that U.S. farmers succeed, means the U.S. wins.