Montana Farmers Launch Their Own Wheat-Backed Foreign Policy
Tired of tariffs, growers say they've cut out Washington and are negotiating directly with Canada—one bushel at a time.
In fields along the Montana-Alberta border, farmers say they've had enough of federal trade wars ruining their yields, so they've begun conducting their own foreign policy, complete with handshake agreements and grain-for-goodwill exchanges.
The newly formed Wheat Belt Diplomatic Corps meets weekly inside a grain silo, where members draft communiqués to their Canadian counterparts promising duty-free bushels in exchange for continued borrowing of irrigation equipment and general moral support.
"We didn't secede, we just found it easier to skip the middlemen," said a spokesperson for the Corps, insisting the group's official seal—a tractor crossing a fence—was purely symbolic and not a declaration of anything.
Across the border, one dairy farmer was seen waving a handwritten sign reading "Trade War? We Brought Snacks," which the Corps has since filed as an official diplomatic gesture.
The group's next order of business, members say, is establishing its own currency, the Grain Standard, whose value will be pegged to whatever diesel happens to cost that week.