Article snippet: BLOOMER, Wis. — Marc Boettcher’s day started before dawn, when he fired up the hammer mill that ground up corn for a mixture he fed to the steers in his barn. There was an empty room where he used to milk dairy cows until he sold them a couple of years back, but on a cold morning this summer, much of the barn was full of cattle — curious, anxious, and endearingly weird — who jostled one another to get a look at him. One left him a gift of manure in the drinking trough. Another managed to climb into the manger and stayed there, blinking, like that was the perfect spot. “Now we got a little battle, to try to get him out,” said Boettcher, a fourth-generation farmer, rolling his eyes. He is used to the uncertainty of farming. He knows how a single snowstorm, a wet spring, or a fire at a processing plant hundreds of miles away can hold him back. He believes climate change has made the weather vacillate more intensely. And now there is another human-made factor that has his long-struggling industry shuddering: President Trump’s trade disputes. “There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it, I’ve lost money,” said Boettcher, as the sun rose over a lush carpet of soybeans in one of his fields. Prices were already low and the retaliatory tariffs that China and other nations have placed on US agriculture, he said, “are just another thing to kind of hold it, or squash it, or keep it down.” Trump’s promise to restore US trade dominance won him deep support in farm country, which he... Link to the full article to read more