Uh Oh, US Farmers Totally Screwed Right Now

And that is bad news for The Groceries.

Cost of amber waves of grain going up! Photo by Tomasz Filipek on Unsplash

For fucking around with the world of Trump, some groups of people are reaching the find out phase faster and harder than others. And one of those groups is among the most loyal to the regime, farmers. While farm income is technically up, it’s only because of $42 billion in socialist bailout money in the form of a 720 percent increase in ad hoc disaster payments, that so far have made up more than 23 percent of Net Farm Income in 2025. But without that, farm income is down nearly 6 percent from December. And economists with the University of Illinois report that agricultural exports dropped by nearly $5 billion in just July alone.

The reason why is no mystery! Those Trump tariffs screwed over farmers coming and going, with higher input costs for supplies like seeds, fertilizer, and tractors, and lower selling prices for commodities. So far this year, China has not purchased one single, solitary soybean, opting to shop for them in friendlier Brazil, instead.

And US soybean farmers are projected to lose roughly $100 an acre this year. Nor are Mexican or Canadian companies as interested in buying the US’s corn or rice, now that retaliatory tariffs have made them more expensive. So farmers who took out loans or dipped into capital reserves expecting to sell their crops are facing the threat of bankruptcy, and in Q1 of 2025 the number of farm bankruptcies was nearly double the level of the first quarter of 2024.

Of course Trump knew full well this was going to happen, because it happened in his first term too: He levied tariffs, farm bankruptcies reached the highest level in a decade, and he ended up giving farmers a $16 billion bailout. And now Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says even more bailout money might be coming.

It would be simple to help out farmers without giving them any socialist bailout money. Quit tariffing fertilizer, for one thing! Even Chuck Grassley has noticed this.

There’s a guy who definitely writes his own posts, who surely does watch a lot of corn. In an interview with RFD-TV, he vented more:

“We’ve got this farm crisis now, and this President should deal with this farm crisis right now. I’m hearing from bankers. I’m hearing from people that are getting pressed by their bankers to maybe sell part of their farm to somebody, [so] that when they build up their equity, they might be able to buy it back. We haven’t had this kind of stress in agriculture since the 1980s.”

Another big-brain idea, quit tariffing tractors! Or even just make ONE tariff rate and stick to it. The tariffs aren’t only expensive, they’re bizarrely complicated, and of course, prone to shifting with the tides of Dear Leader’s ever-changing moods.
From the WSJ:

The effective tariff facing exporters now varies depending on a product’s metal content. For a machine worth $1 million with a 20% steel content, the rate would be 50% of $200,000 and 15% of the rest, resulting in a $220,000 levy per machine—or a 22% tariff. The U.S. has said it would review the metals tariff list every four months, adding to the uncertainty.

Or as Grassley put it:

“Putting 50% tariffs on things that have steel in them, when you can’t buy those things in the United States, and you need them for your tractor to be finally manufactured? There should be tariffs on things that you can’t get in the United States. Why drive up the price of John Deeres because of a tariff on something they need for the tractor that they can’t even get in the United States? It’s a stupid policy.”

Indeed, if the point of these tariffs is to start making more tractors in the US, why put kooky tariffs on the metal that tractors are made out of? If we were cynical, it might seem like a ploy to make farmland real cheap so big agribusiness can buy it all up.

And the shortage of farmworkers is another self-made Trump problem. When the regime isn’t humiliatingly rounding up and detaining people with and without proper work visas, it’s also allowing the ones who do have H-2A visas to work in conditions one federal judge called “a form of modern-day slavery,” where they’re frequently abused, get their wages stolen, and are threatened with a call to ICE if they complain. And if Stephen Miller gets his way, there’d be no foreign workers here at all, and those waitresses, teachers, and stewardesses Miller and his cancel culture horde got fired for not mourning Charlie Kirk properly would be out there picking the oranges. Nobody ever said right-wing ideology was logical.

And then there’s how USAID is no more, and not buying farmers’ extra grain any more. Cruel as they are stupid, ayup.

Are Republicans starting to smell the disaster Trump is brewing? Polling shows more Republicans than Democrats are worried about the economy, and Trump’s approval rating on the top issue dumbshit voters picked him to fix, The Groceries, has been going down to poundtown. And his approval rating is underwater in most states, including the breadbasket ones. Even in Arkansas, it’s plunged to single digits.

That sound effect never gets old.

Anyway, it’s tempting to laugh at the poor dumb rural folk who thought that Donald Trump, the man who went broke on casinos, was going to be their savior. He bailed them out before, so guess they just expect that he and Congress will keep on doing it.

But we all have to eat, and bad news for The Groceries is bad news for everybody. But good news, soyboys, maybe at least domestic soybeans will be real cheap.

[Farm Bureau / University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture / WSJ gift link / ProPublica]

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