..............  The number of small business bankruptcies filed by farmers has reached a five-year high, according to data compiled by Bloomberg in July.          ........

..........  "A lot of people say he's just using tariffs as a bargaining chip, as a bluff," says Gil Gullickson, who owns a farm in South Dakota and edits an agriculture magazine.

"But I can say: history proves that tariffs don't end well."        ...........
.........  on Tester, a former Democrat Senator of Montana, who is a third-generation farmer, told a US news station earlier this month: "With all these tariffs the president's put on, it's interrupted our supply chain… it's increased the cost of new equipment… and because of the trade and tariffs, a lot of customers have said to heck with the United States…

"The people who are new to agriculture, those young farmers who haven't saved money for times like this, they're going to be in trouble and a lot of those folks are going to go broke.

"And if this continues, a lot of folks like me are going to go broke too."     ...................