2025 Fall Farm Outlook Lincoln Daily News Oct 2025 Page 17 One issue would be time, as increasing an industry such as the automotive industry by 50 percent would not be able to happen overnight. Companies such as Ford would have to spend a lot of money and time making new factories, as well as hiring and training new employees. In addition to that, the concept of supply and demand may become an issue, as if new cars are not readily available at first, people will buy more of them since the supply is lower. Then the question of raw material becomes a factor. How much raw material does Ford purchase domestically when producing their vehicles? How much of that material is purchased from overseas? Are there enough raw materials in the U.S. to meet Ford’s needs for producing more vehicles? What will happen to the price of new vehicles if the raw material costs more to purchase in the U.S.? Will it even cost more? Do the construction companies building the new factories purchase their raw materials from other countries? Do they have everything they need domestically? This train of thought raises more questions than this magazine has room to answer. Let us look at one more industry, one that goes in line with the automotive industry and has an impact on almost everyone’s daily lives. Would the U.S. be able to produce enough of its own gasoline? The answer to this is not really. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), “crude oil production reached a record-high 13.6 million barrels per day in July [2025].” The U.S. consumed about 20.25 million barrels per day in 2023. This is one of the two big reasons the U.S. imports a significant amount of oil from Mexico and Canada. According to the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), however, this issue goes deeper than just not producing enough fuel for consumers. The AFPM agrees that not enough is produced, as it states that refineries use about 16.5 million barrels of crude oil per day to maintain current production levels. These refineries cannot run off the oil they produce, however. The oil found in the U.S. tends to be lighter, and the refineries need heavier oil, such as the oil found in Canada. The AFPM continues, shedding light on what it would take to make all these refineries run on U.S. oil. According to the AFPM, “re-tooling refineries to process solely U.S. crude oil (light oil) would cost billions - a risky investment that would take decades to permit, construct and eventually pay off.” It is easy to see, then, that the U.S. becoming a self-sufficient nation is not something that would be easily achievable, should it even be achievable at all. There are so many aspects to the issue that would have to be carefully considered and making it all happen at once would disrupt the economy severely. In addition to that, the U.S. is the second largest exporter of goods in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook, at about $3.19 trillion of goods in 2024. Many industries would need to be restructured to sell to largely an American customer base, and this would likely cause prices of most things to rise. It
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