An op-ed from Missouri Farm Bureau's Charlie Kruse came across my desk recently. Kruse commented that U.S. agricultural exports will likely set a record for fiscal 2006, totaling $64.5 billion. He also mentioned that U.S. agricultural imports are growing. In fact, imports are predicted to be about $61.5 billion in 2006, leaving a meager $3 billion balance. That balance is a narrow tipping margin—the difference between the United States being a net exporter and a net importer of agricultural products.

Kruse went on to explain how the value of the dollar greatly affects this balance. Cheap dollars make our exports more attractive on the world market and vice versa.

Since the 1996 all-time record of a $27.3 billion positive trade balance, our ag trade balance has slipped steadily toward importer status (even as we have been awash in cheap dollars).

There are very modern reasons for this, as Kruse pointed out. Americans want fresh fruit year round. And not just an orange from Florida or a Texas grapefruit. They want passion fruit and tamarind. And American consumers are buying more high-value products that fit into the ag import ledgers. I've long been under the impression that vodka is vodka, but the status seeker will still spend $50 on a bottle of Scandinavian hooch.

It may be shocking to the Corn Belt farmer, but the fact is we're bound for agricultural importer status.

What Kruse didn't say, not in this article anyway, is that along with world trade pressures and shifting consumer trends, there is plenty of trade-balance damage being done here at home.

We're fumbling around with a farm bill that is subject to a big WTO stick. We wonder how we will support U.S. ag infrastructure without running afoul of negotiators, yet we don't do much to keep what agriculture we have safe from overly stringent CAFO rules and stealthy county health ordinances.

The think-global-act-local crew is getting its way. Local actions to stifle agriculture push local markets to someplace else on the globe. South America has its fair share of soybeans and more corn than it used to. Sooner or later, producers there will figure that a positive trade balance depends on adding value to commodities. What better way to do it than by feeding Brazilian meal to pigs and poultry? Haven't we been resting on that formula as a big contributor to our export balance for years?

Our markets are at risk from the increasing notion that the Midwest is a pastoral frontier for housing and farmettes where nothing smells worse than a rose-water sitz bath. NIMBY, they say (not-in-my-back-yard). And NIMBYism stands to wreck your industry. It's one long wave goodbye to agriculture.

Farmers should have jumped on the county zoning bandwagon back when agriculture still had the teeth to zone in its best interests. Now the moneyed suburbanite has his 5 acres on the edge of your place. Or he just bought that scrub ground next door for hunting. His political will must be bent as much as yours to meet in the middle. His numbers grow as yours shrink.

It is time to get to work in the public sphere to explain that agriculture isn't a zero-sum industry. Agriculture is an enormous economic multiplier in this region's rural areas. In one form or another, it still provides most of the income (right behind government transfers, of course).

That's our story to tell, and like it or not, it's our fight for the future. Agriculture will need all of its true sons and daughters to turn this tide. It will be a long road to stop that long wave goodbye.