The Government Is Not Paying Farmers to Destroy Their Crops
The Claim
The government is sending out letters telling farmers to destroy their crops for one-and-a-half times their value. If they choose not to, they will lose all government subsidies.
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Emerging story
Misbar’s Analysis
Our investigation has concluded that there is no government program in place that is paying farmers to destroy their crops. The collection of TikTok videos that are being used to support this claim appear to be a joke.
Two of the video creators, TimmyK and Ryan Peter, have admitted that they were meant as a joke. In the comments of his TikTok post, TimmyK said the following “...its a joke some of us did cause sick of seeing these stupid TTs on this crap.” Peter released a video admitting that he was also joking in his now-deleted original post.
Many of the videos originate in Nebraska, prompting a local news station, NTV, to investigate the claim. They looked into a letter that was displayed in one of the TikTok posts. It turns out that the letter was from 2018. It was about training sessions for manure applications and had nothing to do with crop destruction.
A spokeswoman for the Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) confirmed with NTV that the government does not have a program paying farmers to destroy crops. The NDA communications director told the station, “Don’t believe everything you see on the internet!”
Back in 2020, farmers did go through a period where they were forced to destroy their crops. However, this had nothing to do with a government program and was due to the coronavirus pandemic. School, restaurant, and hotel closures left many farmers without buyers for their crops leading to the destruction of tens of millions of pounds of perishable foods.
