He and his brother would not have purchased an excavator and a bulldozer, expensive equipment they most likely will not need again to harvest pecans. Instead of laboring for six months on their own to clear away the thousands of trees knocked over by hurricane winds, they would have hired contractors to do it in three weeks.
But with billions of dollars in relief for homes, farms and businesses stalled in Congress — and little movement over the past two weeks of spring recess — Cohen, 45, is three months behind in planting and wondering if help will ever arrive. Debris from Hurricane Michael — the remains of trees older than Cohen — still smoldered in his fields this past week as he burned away a generation of pecan groves felled by the storm this fall.
“The American farmer is just being used as a pawn,” Cohen said, sitting in the pickup truck he calls an office. He and his brother sold one of their farms after the storm, a painful decision he said was made with the longevity of the overall enterprise in mind. “We’re not being taken seriously. It’s a struggle.”
“My little pecans aren’t going to be missed at all,” Cohen said, noting that it would be about 10 years before any new pecan trees began producing. “And that, that kind of opens your eyes.”
Congress last passed a broad disaster relief package in February 2018, when lawmakers slipped nearly $90 billion into a wide-ranging spending agreement. In the year since, record-breaking natural disasters have ravaged the country: wildfires in California, hurricanes in Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas, and floods across Iowa, Nebraska and much of the rest of the Midwest.
But efforts to wrangle a relief package through Congress — typically a seamless feat of bipartisanship — have repeatedly failed, not because senators do not want to help people like Cohen, some of whom cannot yet reach their land, but because President Donald Trump does not want to give more money to Puerto Rico.
Democrats are not giving up their effort to increase aid to the island, a U.S. territory devastated by hurricanes in 2017, as Democratic senators push to match what their House counterparts have approved. But Senate Republicans, wary of challenging Trump, say they have acquiesced enough — and unlike the states covered in the package, Puerto Rico has received some financial aid.
And even with some discussions among staff members over the recess, Congress’ return on Monday is unlikely to yield a quick resolution, leaving hundreds of farmers who have been battered by Trump’s trade war and low commodity prices stranded during prime planting season.
“In a time of crisis, you’re supposed to let that kind of stuff go so you can run toward the fire with water and help,” said John K. Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. “We still have folks fighting over whether you should use a bucket.”
In interviews this past week, several farmers across the country said the debate hundreds of miles away in Washington had left them in limbo, wary of moving forward without the promise of federal aid. Outside their state governments, which have allocated money, and their delegations, the farmers said, few politicians understand the scope of the damage for their families and their communities.
And some worry that the less tangible consequences — their ability to provide food to the country, support their communities and maintain the legacy of agriculture for their children — will go unnoticed.
“There’s heritage in this stuff,” Jeff Jorgenson, 43, a third-generation farmer, said as he stood in front of one of the submerged corn fields he oversees in Fremont County, Iowa. “We have to take care of what came before us.”
“I hope I can have the next generation do this,” he said.
Even when aid packages reach the president’s desk, it often takes months for the money to make it to farmers. Some in Georgia who lost crops in the 2017 hurricane season did not start receiving money allocated in the February 2018 package until the end of that summer, before Hurricane Michael — making landfall as a Category 5 storm — swept away what many deemed to be a perfect crop of cotton and downed pecan trees days away from harvest.
“To say they’re dissatisfied is to say it very lightly,” said Gary W. Black, Georgia’s commissioner of agriculture. “I think it’s grossly unfair to them.”
But few of the farmers here, eager for any update on the status of negotiations in Washington, were willing to single out a culprit beyond the forces of nature and the specter of a federal government seemingly disconnected from its citizens. And few objected to the prospect of Puerto Rico receiving more aid — as long as their money was allocated, too.
“It’s our turn, but we’re not getting our turn,” said Bart Davis, a cotton farmer who met with Trump when he visited after the storm. “They’re not doing their jobs up there.”
In Iowa and Nebraska, where the wind can create white-peaked waves in fields of amber grain more than a month after floodwaters swept through, a delay in federal aid means that farmers have little direction when it comes to recovering flooded land and planting again.
“Everywhere you turn, it’s just not there anymore,” Richard Hoppe, 61, said, choking up as he surveyed his family’s property in Richland, Nebraska, where beach sand, deposited by the floodwaters, clogs the stream where he fished for carp as a child and the fields where he grew corn and soybeans. Now, when he drives the couple miles to his farm, he knows he will wake up that night, “mind churning, worried.”
But, he added, “If you sell a farm, you’re not a farmer anymore.”
Several farmers have heard stories and rumors of neighbors selling their lands, weary of the emotional and financial toll it takes to maintain them. Michelle Soll, a farmer who helps answer phone calls for a rural hotline in Nebraska, said queries in the last six months have focused on addressing financial distress.
“It creates a lot of stress, a lot of unknown and a lot of tension,” said Soll, who has also been working to clear her own land with her husband. (Debris in the area can include an intact shed from a neighbor’s land, tires and refrigerators.)
But the familial ties to the land, coupled with the pride in their work, are enough for the majority of farmers to vow that somehow, they will figure it out.
“If I quit now, I could still have a pretty comfortable life,” said Michael Stenzel, 45, a fourth-generation farmer in Hamburg, Iowa. Waist-high water still fills his fields, and it is unclear how he will discard the towering mounds of corn and soybeans, spilling out from split steel grain bins, that are now rotting away.
But, Stenzel added, “This is an awesome life.”
“I help feed the world,” he said. “The more farmers that quit and walk away, the more people that don’t get fed.”
Ultimately, as Washington wrestles with the disaster package, some of the farmers said they would look to Mother Nature, which wreaked the initial havoc, for stability moving forward: delayed rains, absorbent soil and most important, no more storms and floods.
As Cohen drove his pickup truck through what was left of his pecan grove, he occasionally stopped to look for signs of harvest, pulling down branches to see if there were flowers. The first tree, under duress and in the face of cold weather, had none. But farther down the row, he reached out to examine a small cluster of red buds.
“Hey, we’ll count that as a win today,” Cohen said jubilantly. “We’ve got five.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.