When it comes to just who is eligible for trade aid, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said Smithfield Foods shouldn’t be one of the companies which are eligible for help, but there may be no choice. Smithfield is owned by Chinese conglomerate WH Group. Grassley took to Twitter and says, “Smithfield seems to be in a ‘can’t-lose’ situation thanks to American taxpayers.” A spokesman for the Iowa Republican, who’s also a member of the Senate Ag Committee, says Grassley is looking into the matter. Early last week, the Washington Post reported that Smithfield does qualify for trade aid assistance. The Post says the idea of a bailout program helping out Smithfield has angered small hog producers across the country. The Post report says the situation shows how difficult it is to craft relief programs and keep the payments exclusively in the hands of domestic companies. Companies that have long international reach make it difficult to ensure U.S. dollars stay in U.S. hands, regardless of their intended target. In an email, a USDA spokesman says the agency does not have the ability to make sure relief money doesn’t eventually filter into Chinese hands.

The Trump Administration has no plans in place for 2019 to give any more aid to farmers hurt by tariffs. Bloomberg says that’s based on assumptions that markets will recover even if the trade war with China keeps going. Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue made that announcement last week. Back in July, the administration announced it would deliver $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by the tit-for-tat tariff war with China. Last month, farmers were able to apply for the first round of aid that totaled $4.7 billion. Perdue didn’t disclose when a second round of aid would be distributed. Perdue says, “The trade war impacted farmers after they made planting decisions for 2018. The market will equilibrate over a period of time.” He told farmers at a stop in Illinois last week that there is not an expected or anticipated market facilitation program for 2019. Perdue didn’t offer any guesses as to how much longer the trade war with China would continue, saying only that “the onus is on China.”

USDA is considering the possibility of adjusting direct payments to producers who’ve been hurt by the trade war. The adjustments may include factoring in hurricane damage after southeast U.S. producers were hit hard by hurricanes this year. A DTN report says Perdue asked USDA staff to look at the fact that they believe payments should be based on actual production and not country averages. “I think we’ve got to look at situations where people had good crops that were totally obliterated,” Perdue says in the DTN report. “These safety-net programs don’t factor that consideration into the equation.” Meantime, Perdue made clear that USDA will be announcing a second round of payments under the Market Facilitation Program to producers hurt by tariffs. He didn’t say when the announcement of another round of payments would be made. USDA officials had previously said it would be happening in December. The secretary said last week that he wanted to allay concerns that the second round of trade-aid payments might not be made to U.S. producers.

During a Champaign County, Illinois listening session U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue confirmed the second round of Market Facilitation Payments for farmers will be coming in December. Secretary Perdue says his agency unsuccessfully looked for ways to vary the payments from region to region based on the impact of Chinese imposed tariffs. There had been some speculation, for instance, farmers in the Dakota’s might end up with bigger payments because soybean exports out the PNW to China have stopped. But he says that while they looked at that issue early, they could not find a way to reasonable get it done.As for next year, Perdue says farmers should not expect to receive more payments to compensate them for losses due to the Trump Administration’s trade policy goals. Perdue also told the gathered farmers in Illinois, more than once that they should look to diversify their operations in order to avoid the market disruptions caused by the Trump Administration’s rebalancing of trade.

The world’s largest grain processors are jointly seeking to standardize and digitize global agriculture shipping transactions. Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus announced the collaboration this week in an effort to benefit the entire industry and seek broad-based industry participation to promote global access and adoption. Initially, the companies are focused on technologies to automate grain and oilseed post-trade execution processes, as they represent a highly manual and costly part of the supply chain, with the industry spending significant amounts of money every year moving documents around the globe. Eliminating inefficiencies would lead to shorter document-processing times, reduced wait times and better end-to-end contracting visibility. Longer term, the companies want to drive greater reliability, efficiency and transparency by replacing other manual, paper-based processes tied to contracts, invoices and payments, with a more modern, digitally based approach.

The U.S. Drought Monitor weekly update shows more wet weather ahead for the Midwest. Much of the Corn Belt received adequate or above needed moisture this growing season. However, pockets in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma were extremely dry. Recent rains have turned the tables, and much of the Midwest is experiencing wet harvest conditions. The Drought Monitor notes that a wet weather pattern is in store for much of the southern and eastern United States as the NWS six-to-ten-day outlook for October 30th – November 3rd calls for near-to above-normal precipitation over much of the nation, with drier-than-normal weather limited to the West Coast and lower Southeast. The latest data from the Department of Agriculture show that the nation’s corn and soybean harvest were roughly halfway finished early this week, with the expecting of further progress. However, that progress, given the forecast, looks to be stalled again next week.

The biggest move by China against the U.S. in the tit-for-tat trade war could be a movement towards abandoning U.S. soybeans. China, facing a potential shortage following its 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans, is already purchasing from other suppliers and proposing to cut the amount of protein used in livestock feeds. CNN reports that one of China’s top feed industry groups proposed animals could get by with less than needed protein “at the moment.” The proposal would be hard to carry out for China, as millions of farmers would need to reduce the amount of foreign soybeans eaten by their pigs. China is also encouraging its domestic agriculture to produce more soybeans, but analysts say China is a long way from being able to produce anywhere near enough. Still, any shift in the market away from the U.S. poses great harm to U.S. producers as the United States sold more than $12 billion worth of soybeans to China last year.