Farmers are Being Seriously Messed With

Let me say, right up front, that my knowledge of agriculture is minimal. Food grows in supermarkets.

But I have done some homework to back up a suspicion of mine, which is that in terms of existential peril wrought by the Trump regime, there is no single group — with the glaring exception of our immigrant population — being bludgeoned as cruelly as the nation's farmers.

Yes, there is deep irony in knowing that farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump, many of them three times. Yes, it’s another FAFO moment — one of many coming fast and furious now. The problem is that we’re talking about our food supply here. We need those farmers — dumbshit Trump voters or not — to keep growing stuff for us to eat too much of.

So it is of some concern to all of us that farm bankruptcies are up 36% since Trump took office. Underlying that figure is the grim fact that the market prices of virtually every major crop grown in this country are lower than the costs required to grow them. This is causing disruptions that are already rippling their way to the checkout counter.

Farmers are now caught between multiple rocks and hard places. Between the insane tariffs, the insane ethnic cleansing of their labor pool, and the insane refusal to even acknowledge the disastrous effects of extreme weather, there is now no amount of sane-washing that can convince farmers that this regime even knows what a farm is. Something about Old MacDonald.

The current chaos over immigrants — both documented and not — has a direct impact on the ability to plant, harvest, and process our foods. Which in turn has a direct impact on which of those foods is available to us, and how much we pay for them. Farmers rely disproportionately on noncitizen labor — mostly Latino — for all those things. In spite of right-wing rhetoric, there are few Americans willing to do such jobs, at any wage.

Now, thanks to the immigration “policies” of Stephen Miller, much of that labor has disappeared. It’s not just that undocumented workers are being deported, it’s that they’re afraid to go to work. And the resulting labor shortfall is being felt throughout the farm sector.

Already there have been crop losses, and it will only get worse. Farm profits — which weren’t great to begin with — are now a memory. With nobody to pick them, some crops just die in the field.

Many farmers are being forced to switch from crops that are labor-intensive — fruits, nuts, and vegetables — to more mechanized crops like corn and potatoes. This will make greens harder to get, and therefore more expensive. It will make starches cheaper, and more likely to replace real nutrition in people with marginal diets. We could end up with a food economy that favors, even more than usual, French fries over fresh fruit.

But the labor shortage, devastating as it is, is arguably less devastating than the Trump tariffs, which are hitting farmers from all directions. Anything farmers want to buy, sell, export, or import is affected, one way or another.

Tariffs create nervous uncertainty, up and down every supply chain. Farmers don’t know what to plant, because they don’t know who'll be buying their harvest. Markets that were dependably predictable just a year ago have vanished, as long-time trading partners look for better deals with anyone but us.

In 2024, farmers were selling to USAID, which was sending American food all over the world — DOGE put a stop to that. They were selling to the USDA under the SNAP program — Republicans in Congress gutted that. They were selling $12 billion worth of soybeans to the Chinese, but didn’t sell them a single soybean in all of 2025.

And soybean farmers were still reeling from Trump’s first term, when he was just starting to flex his tariff muscle. Back then, his tariffs forced China to look for a more dependable supply of soybeans. They found Brazil, a country quite happy to steal our farm industry’s biggest customer, and they didn’t even have to steal it. Together, China and Brazil now dominate the world soybean market, which never should have happened. Trump shot us all in the foot.

But it’s not just that farmers see their markets evaporating. They’re also seeing their costs explode. Tariffs have made all agricultural inputs — seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, machinery — significantly more expensive. Taken as a whole, there is no masking the ripple effects of this stupidity:

In Mississippi, the price of rice is so underwater that much of the state’s rice crop isn’t even being harvested. Why bother when there are no buyers?

In Iowa, where the two most important crops are corn and soybeans, farmers are losing money on every bushel they sell. This negativity has rippled through the state’s economy, suppressing sales of farm machinery, and causing layoffs of over 1,300 of the workers who make that machinery.

Of course, red states generally have been harder hit by these ripples, not because they have more farmland, but because they are run by Trumpy Republicans who will officially ignore the problem.

But as if all this weren’t bad enough, the regime also slashed funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA is deeply embedded in the farm community, providing all kinds of services and guidance that farmers generally find indispensable — the most important, of course, being reliable weather information. Data from NOAA’s National Weather Service helps farmers figure out what to plant, when to plant it, when to fertilize, when to harvest, and what weather events, if any, might ruin their day.

Recently, NOAA had also been funding climate adaptation teams, working directly with farmers on ways to adapt to climate shifts and extreme weather events, which of course don't exist in the current administration. Let’s remember that just one of those nonexistent events can erase an entire year’s profits, and then some. And those events are getting bigger, more frequent, and more destructive — existent, in other words.

Given the enormous cast of villains now running government agencies, you may be less familiar with Brooke Rollins, who pretends to be the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Rollins is not known for her sensitivity to kitchen-table issues, which would seem a serious shortcoming in someone with that job title.

You may have caught her act a month ago when she defended RFK Jr’s new meat-heavy food pyramid against concerns that millions of Americans won’t be able to afford it, especially with grocery prices where they are. After first telling us that “The cost of groceries are actually coming down,” she then gave us this gem:

“It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, a corn tortilla and one other thing. So there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money.”

Why do I think that’s not what she had for dinner last night? But I bring her up only because when she was asked, early in the administration, who would work on our farms if the labor force were thoroughly depleted through mass deportation, her response was that she would address “any hypothetical issues that turn out to be real.”

Those issues have since turned out to be quite real. It’s the addressing of them that remains, alas, quite hypothetical.