Low prices and Trump’s trade war are pushing these Northwest farmers to the brink

From KUOW

Back in the New Deal era, the Northwest’s mighty rivers were dammed allowing barges to cheaply bring grain from the wheat fields of eastern Washington to the coast for export.

Today, at ports along the Snake River, trucks unload grain to five-storey high bins along the banks. Most barges that pull up to the terminals carry the equivalent of 150 semi trucks worth of grain downriver to Portland.

Typically more than 90 percent of all the wheat grown here ends up in countries like Japan, Korea and the Philippines, where it’s used for noodles, confections and crackers. This is how it’s been for as long as Jim Moyer can remember. His family first started farming along the rolling, fertile Palouse region of Washington in the 1890s. Read the rest of the article here.