Numerous viewers have sent VERIFY videos about farmers claiming the federal government is paying them to destroy their crops, or withholding subsidies until they destroy their crops.
Some farmers posted viral videos on TikTok and YouTube that claim the USDA sent them a letter telling them to destroy their crops. Many of those videos were later edited together in a viral Facebook video that claims the government is trying to create a food shortage.
A spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau Federation told VERIFY in an email that the government is not telling farmers to destroy crops and that the claim originated from a series of joke videos posted to TikTok in July. He called it a “non-issue.”
A USDA spokesperson said there isn’t a federal program sending out letters encouraging farmers to destroy crops. “These rumors are not true,” the spokesperson told VERIFY in an email.
“I've seen people perpetuate this claim in the past,” said Trent Loos, a Nebraska rancher whose family has been in the farming industry since 1832. “But it really accelerated in the past two months.”
Loos, who raises cattle, was one of several people from the agriculture industry to debunk the misinformation on social media with a video he posted to Facebook.
Peterson Farm Brothers, a trio of siblings who run a family farm and own a popular Facebook page, said in their own video the rumor wasn’t true.
Tony Reed, who runs a popular farming TikTok account called @growincorn2020, explained in July that the videos spreading the rumor, including one of his own, were jokes and not based on fact.
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