MURTAUGH, Idaho — Three 20,000-gallon storage tanks holding diesel to fuel farm equipment were the backdrop for a press conference on Aug. 25 to discuss the impact of inflation on agriculture.

The price of off-road diesel went from $2.98 a gallon in 2021 to $5.17 this year, a 73% increase, said Larry Hollifield, president of the Twin Falls County Farm Bureau.

The difference the farmer had to pay to fill just one of those tanks was $43,800 from one year to the next, he said.

The price of everything else a producer uses on the farm has gone up as well, from a 21% increase for bailing twine and a 43% increase for pivot tires to as much as a 118% increase in fertilizer, he said.

Because farmers are price-takers, all they can do is absorb the higher costs, said Zak Miller, Idaho Farm Bureau CEO.

Because farmers will take the hit, “that may mean legacies are lost and ability to feed the world is taken away,” he said.

On top of that, farmers face an extreme labor shortage, and crops across the nation may go unharvested, he said.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said trillions of dollars of debt-financed spending in the U.S. is driving record inflation. He has a meter on his website that shows the national debt is more than $30.7 trillion.

It comes from unfettered spending, taxing and regulatory sprees in Washington, D.C., that are  driving up prices, he said.

“It comes also, particularly in the energy zone, from the policies of this administration that have depressed American production of oil and gas products,” he said.

The U.S. has gone from being energy independent with excess to export to energy dependent because the Biden administration has shut down production on public lands and offshore, shut down pipelines and stopped development of refining and storage capacity at ports, he said.

“We are in a position of essentially bleeding out our strategic petroleum reserves and asking other nations to help us out in our energy crisis,” he said.

The U.S. needs to deal with inflation and get back to a stable, powerful economy, he said.

“We’ve got to get America back into the business of producing our own energy. We need to become energy independent again, and we can do that,” he said.

The U.S. can stop the bans on development and marketing of U.S. oil reserves and build the infrastructure that again makes it a world leader in energy production to strengthen the U.S. economy, he said.

“We proved just two years ago that we can do this. It requires Washington to repair its broken energy policy,” he said.

The U.S. also needs to address the labor shortage by passing sensible immigration policy, negotiate trade agreements and build infrastructure, he said.

He’s hopeful Americans will demand more focus on those issues.

“I think America needs to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what we need to do to address it, he said.