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Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain in his office, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, in Baton Rouge, La. STAFF PHOTO BY HILARY SCHEINUK Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain in his office, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, in Baton Rouge, La. STAFF PHOTO BY HILARY SCHEINUK Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain in his office, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, in Baton Rouge, La.
STAFF PHOTO BY HILARY SCHEINUK Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain in his office, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, in Baton Rouge, La. STAFF PHOTO BY HILARY SCHEINUK Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain sat down with columnists Faimon Roberts and Stephanie Grace recently to talk about farmers, tariffs, the economy and other topics affecting the industry today. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Roberts: What do you see as the biggest challenges to agriculture in the upcoming year? Strain: The biggest challenge right now is the low commodity prices, and we're working desperately to get that up. Now, you wouldn't think that when you go to the grocery to buy food products, that there's a huge disconnect between what the farmer gets and what is going on at retail. We're at the end of the season, when you would expect the prices to be higher.
And if you look at the price of soybeans, they've been hovering at or below $10 or so. If you look at rice, $13, $14, that's just too low. And so for many of our farmers, if the commodities prices do not rise across America, then they're going to have big issues going into next year on getting crop loans.
Grace: So we’re seeing high grocery prices — everyone's talking about this — but low commodity prices. Where the disconnect? Strain: The disconnect is the fact that inflation pressures supply and demand, and the increased cost due to inflation from the point of processing forward is being borne by the consumer. From that point on, different entities set the price and the farmer is basically told: This is what you're going to get.
There's also the disruption in the worldwide economy, worldwide market issues dealing with the value of the American dollar versus foreign currency. It's making it harder for us to export and cheaper for us to import, which adversely affects the price of our commodities, because our commodities are sold in dollars. And since the dollar is much stronger than the euro, the pound, the yen and yuan, it is much more difficult for us to export.
Forty percent of the value of these commodities is based on the export market. So across the board, we import in all goods and commodities over a trillion dollars more than we export in the United States. The imbalance of trade agriculturally is going to be between $45 and $55 billion.
Grace: Do tariffs help? Strain: So you have to look on a macroeconomics level with tariffs, and also look at what tariffs can do. And with tariffs, the problem is we are exporting money out and not importing money in through all of our products. This is putting a strain on our entire financial system, driving the imbalance in the currencies, and you see it in the foreign currencies being driven down by the amount of dollars we're putting into the foreign economies.
We've got to move more goods offshore. If you look at our soybean crop, a third or more of our entire crop has to be exported. We're the largest exporter of food in the world, twice the size of Ukraine.
And we have got to move those markets, increase supply going out and get a better, a more favorable dollar. Exporting Louisiana products Roberts: We've seen news stories about the cuts to USAID harming Louisiana and other farming state's exports. What impact are those having? Strain: That's going to be remain to be seen.
If you look specifically at rice with USAID, between Louisiana and Arkansas, we're the two largest producers. Fifty percent of the rice crop is shipped outside the country. If you look at USAID, 5% to 10% of the entire rice crop that is shipped out is for food aid.
So if you take 10% of 50%, that's 5% of the total rice crop that’s shipped out for food aid. The bottom line is that the world's hungry, and there are a lot of parts of the world that are not getting adequate nutrition. If you take the island of Cuba, the average Cuban is 250 to 275 calories short per day, every day, and that's happening across the world.
Once these monetary things are corrected, I think you're gonna see a greater demand for the products we have. The bottom line is that we are continuing to consume more across the world than we're producing, we're eating into inventories, but at some point the inventory is going to get too tight, and that's going to cause — hopefully not a rapid rise in commodity prices — but it is going to cause a rise in commodity prices. Grace: I think I'm hearing you say that you think that these aid programs should continue.
Is that right? Strain: Well, I mean, I guess for the sake of the farmers and also for the people who are receiving food, which is the greatest form of diplomacy. We need to look in these programs to find out where the waste, fraud and abuse are and clean that up, period. Now, with that being said, wherever we can feed those that are starving, we need to do that — but we've got to look at where the money is really going.
Grace: Have you seen diversions? Strain: I haven't, because most of that's handled federally. Roberts: What are you hearing from rice farmers? Strain: They're a little nervous right now, because no one knows exactly what's going to happen. Normally, most of the rice is going into the ground by Valentine's Day.
So you're seeing the rice being planted. We got to plant the rice so we can have the crawfish, right? And so the farmers, they're gonna plant, and then we're gonna work really hard to try to get good commodity prices. Roberts: What are some markets that are out there that you think we should be getting into? Strain: Pacific Rim, looking at India specifically, and maybe South America, Mexico as well.
We're shipping a lot of rice to Cuba. Roberts: In the last few years, we've seen sort of an unprecedented run of weather events in Louisiana. Strain: Ag commissioners recognize that we live with the climate changing, and it's imperative upon us to start looking ahead and be better prepared.
We know that plant pests and disease can generally be found a latitude further north than 10 years ago. And we're recognizing that we need to try to be prepared and start looking ahead. Waiting on the Farm Bill Roberts: What impact has the delay in the Farm Bill had in Louisiana, and what you would like to see in a new Farm Bill? Strain: I'm thinking the new Farm Bill, we're going to have to make sure we have adequate and consistent farming funding for the foreign ag service so that we can do the outreach and get into the markets.
We need to make sure that we are stepping up on research to deal with any emerging diseases that may be there. We also need to make sure that crop insurance is adequate and the reference prices are correct. Don't put all these programs in and have reference prices that are 10 years out of date.
Reference prices and yields, they need to be correct. Grace: Will it be a different process because of the atmosphere up there than it has been in the past? Strain: I think a lot of the legwork has been done. This thing should have been passed two years ago, right? So when it gets down to the bottom line, once it's all written out, then you're gonna have SNAP versus commodities.
Grace: SNAP has become very politicized. Do you think SNAP should be altered? Strain: Well, what I would like to see is that we raise incomes up enough to where people don't have to rely on it. No one in this country should ever go hungry.
I would like to see it to where people are earning their way off those programs. Political evolution Grace: Let's shift a little to state politics. It seems from the outside that politics has changed quite a bit over the period you've been in office.
How do you think it's changed? Strain: In my family, we believe that of all those things that God gives us, we got to give back, and it's in public service. So as you recall, I replaced my cousin in the Legislature, Big Bill Strain. He was there like 28 years.
At that time, there were far fewer Republicans, there were more Democrats. But it was a very, very cordial. I don't see it as being quite as cordial as it was.
Grace: It's become much more partisan. Strain: And we always talked about that we didn't want it to become partisan because I work with all sides of the aisle, Democrats, Republican, even those independents. That's just my nature to do that.
My legislative instruments, I never looked at when I asked the author, Democrat or Republican, it's who's the champion of that issue. Grace: It seems like everything's a party-line vote these days. Strain: But not in agriculture.
Everybody's got to eat. Their constituents buy groceries. I get along fine with Troy Carter.
He and I are good friends. And I can talk to Troy just like I'm talking to Clay Higgins or Julia Letlow or any of them. Grace: There have been controversies over how much former agricultural land has been taken up by solar farms.
How has that affected the farmers in the state? Strain: If you lose 10,000 acres of sugar, you could lose a mill. That's a big deal. It (solar) needs to be on land of minimal food-producing value.
Roberts: I also wanted to ask about the condition and the future of the timber industry in Louisiana. Strain: One of the issues that we're continuing to battle is the dumping of Canadian timber on the American market. The Canadians dump softwoods on our markets, depressing our markets.
And so overall, we have got to get interest rates down so we can rebuild and start building more houses. Do we need Canadian timber for that? No, sir, we got plenty. We have massive amount of timber.
The other thing that we are doing is developing additional utilization for the timber. We have 15 million acres of farmed softwoods and about 3.6 million acres of hardwoods.
So that's 18.6 million acres. Like with Drax, where we mix hardwood and some soft wood.
We send that to England and Europe, where they burn it for electricity. Getting shrimp rules right Grace: Before we wrap up, what should we be looking at coming from you in the legislative session? Strain: I think we will see some changes in the way seafood is dealt with that, because it's very complicated what we're doing now. We are inspecting imported seafood, but we are working on a contract under CRT through the shrimp safety task force, along with wildlife and fisheries and the seafood promotion board and health and hospitals.
So it's very complicated. But I can tell you we are testing seafood, we are looking at labels. The shrimp industry is struggling to survive.
We have really got to work to help promote Louisiana shrimp. If you go back to my first days in the Legislature, we had big shrimp boils. Now we have crawfish boils.
We really pushed and promoted the crawfish industry. And now the crawfish industry, it's $250, $300 million a year, but the shrimping industry is dying on the vine. What's on the menu has got to be what's being served.
Now, if you choose to serve foreign shrimp, that's fine. You can't say that it's Louisiana shrimp when it's imported. You can't do that because consumer has a right to know what they're eating and to be protected.
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