This is the time of year when hobby gardeners like me begin setting up grow lights, buying peat pots, sketching out a map of this year’s beds, and whipping out credit cards for mail-order seeds. If you like the physical work, a 40x40 plot will keep you in flowers, berries, and produce for most of the summer; while root vegetables, garlic, onions, and frozen produce last for a good chunk of the winter (butternut squash, anyone?)
Things happen, of course. A mama vole built a nest next to my friend’s sweet potato bed, eliminating her harvest but growing a robust family of pups. Two years ago, a rainy June meant that everyone in the community garden ended up with a rollicking case of tomato blossom end rot, and when the flea beetles show up, if you haven’t set up hoops and covers, rows of kale become green lace.
We in the local community garden shrug such things off. Real farmers can’t; nor can they take the economic gut punches that the Trump administration is handing them daily. At a time of year when they have already purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of seed and fertilizer on credit, and the market is shrinking, farmers are said to be nervous.
Strikingly, given the role that food prices played in the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump had little of substance to say to the nation’s food industry last night in his 99-minute stemwinder of hatred last night. Reprising his Greatest Campaign Hits, not only did Trump seem almost entirely unaware of how agriculture works, but he seemed not to care. At the same time, his Cabinet and policy staff also seem unable to coerce him into even thinking about agriculture, a $1.5 trillion sector of our economy that represents over 5% of our gross domestic product (GDP).
It’s particularly odd since the agricultural Midwest and South powered Trump to victory less than five months ago. Look at this map of the 2024 presidential election results:
In a word: although these are not densely populated states, they represent a substantial chunk of Trump voters. And those Blue states? Farmers and rural communities vote Republican there too, Let’s take California as an example. Most of the votes that make these states Democratic come from the coastal districts, while the agricultural regions of the state are very red, and keep that razor-thin GOP House majority even remotely viable.
It’s puzzling, then, that out of that ninety-nine minutes, Trump addressed the economic structure of American agriculture and the future of its workers for fewer than five.
Beginning with a brief nod to the price of eggs (which is even higher than it was in the fall), Trump took the opportunity to blame President Joe Biden for letting eggs “get out of control. The egg price is out of control,” he repeated, “and we're working hard to get it back down. Secretary, do a good job on that. You inherited a total mess from the previous administration. Do a good job.”
I’m not sure which secretary he was talking to—probably Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture—but Trump gave no indication that he understands why eggs are expensive, or that Secretary Rollins recently unveiled a $1 billion initiative that includes “$500 million for biosecurity measures, $400 million in financial relief for affected farmers, and $100 million for vaccine research, action to reduce regulatory burdens, and exploring temporary import options.” None of this is going to bring the price of eggs down any time soon; nor did Trump acknowledge that an egg shortage affected anyone but your average American breakfast eater.
But the more important question is: given the deep cuts to the federal workforce authorized by Trump, who will be there to carry out Rollins’ program?
According to one independent news source in Minnesota, mass layoffs at the USDA “are `crippling’ the agency, upending federal workers’ lives and leaving farmers and rural communities without needed support.” Nebraska Public Media reports that “dozens” of researchers working on animal disease control in Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Kansas have been terminated—although recently, “the USDA scrambled to hire back employees who deal with the government’s response to bird flu.” Federal agricultural specialists have also suffered mass layoffs in Oregon and Washington.
If the uncertainty and chaos of disease prevention and research programs is not making farmers nervous enough, add the effects of weather events due to climate change, and shrinking federal price supports for the commodities market. Yet, this is what Trump had to say about how his isolationist foreign policy and trade wars will affect farmers. “Our new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer:”
I love the farmer. Who will now be selling into our home market, the USA, because nobody is going to be able to compete with you. Because there's goods that come in from other companies, countries and companies. They're really, really in a bad position in so many different ways. They're uninspected. They may be very dirty and disgusting, and they come in and they pour in and they hurt our American farmers. The tariffs will go on agricultural product coming into America and our farmers starting on April 2nd.
Of course, Trump conceded, “It may be a little bit of an adjustment period. We had that before when I made the deal with China.”
It wasn’t a little adjustment period: it was a permanent slide in commodities prices, and shrinking foreign sales, whose effects are felt today. “There was an immediate impact, you know, on the market,” one soybean producer told NPR reporter Scott Simon in February. “We saw within the first few days of the retaliatory tariffs from China in 2018 nearly a $2 drop when it comes to soybeans in the cash price that we were able to receive.”
This must be what Trump was referring to when he mused: “I said, just bear with me. And they did. They did. Probably have to bear with me again and this will be even better. That was great.” But farmers don’t remember it as “great,” but rather “a Band-Aid approach” that permitted China and other countries to shift their attentions away from United States producers. The permanent damage, according to the farmer interviewed by Simon, has been a 30-50% drop in commodity prices.
The only thing that kept many farmers in business were compensatory payments—from the Trump administration! And it was Biden pumping money into farm subsidies, grants, and loans that kept many farmers afloat long enough to vote for Trump in 2024.
Already in a period of mild economic decline, American farmers will be harmed by other Trump policies, including cuts to USAID and other foreign aid programs. These are, in essence, cuts to federal spending on American farmers, whose products the United States has purchased and sent abroad since World War II.
Farmers stand to lose approximately $2.1 billion from these cuts.
You also don’t have to be a policy wonk to understand why labor shortages fueled by Donald Trump’s war on immigrants will simultaneously drive up costs and leave crops to rot in the field. While machines can pick some crops, they can’t pick all of them, and they don’t move irrigation pipes, care for livestock, drive tractors, sex chickens….the list goes on.
I partly grew up in farm country, southern Idaho to be precise, a place you know for potatoes, but which grows a far greater range of agricultural products because of its light, rich volcanic soil and mild climate. Idaho is also a perennial employer of migrant laborers, despite the fact that potatoes and sugar beets are no longer dug by hand. Of the almost 62,000 agricultural workers that labor in the state, almost 81 percent are migratory. An estimated 10,000, or 1/6 of that labor force, is undocumented. Nationally, Idaho is on the low end of undocumented labor: 42 percent of the approximately 240,000 workers who make up the farm labor work force are vulnerable to deportation under Trump policies. Another 17 percent are immigrants authorized to work, but now more vulnerable under the Laken Riley Act.
In a strange twist of fate, Idaho—one of hte most MAGA states in the country—is suffering such a severe labor shortage, that it is trying to legislate its own guest worker program. This is almost surely unconstitutional, and puts Idaho on course for conflict with Trump aide Stephen Miller, who would feed immigrants to sharks if he could.
History suggests that, in breaking with decades of policies that have supported and promoted agriculture, MAGA policies are terrible for farmers. Take a look at this next chart, which graphs farm bankruptcies between 2015 and 2024, the period spanning the first Trump, and then the Biden, administrations.
Do you see what I see? Farm failures, already on the rise, accelerated under Trump, rising dramatically in 2019 when the effects of the 2018 tariffs undermined the subsequent growing season. Bankruptcies decreased slightly as the administration pumped money into the system in 2020, receding when the Biden administration began to reinstitute traditional farm supports.
And here’s the thing: each of those farms -- whether they are part of a large agribusiness enterprise or the 89 percent that gross $250,000 or less annually and are classified as “small family farms” -- supports rural people and the communities they live in. They underwrite the state and local tax structure, small businesses, and the people those businesses employ.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party are, of course, in love with an idea about reviving industrial labor on a model that hasn’t been dominant in the United States since the mid-1970s. MAGA fanboys in the media are just as urban as Trump, uninterested in and ignorant about farming: one political consultant I was sparring with on X disparaged farmers as “whiners.” That characterization is anything but true—one of the reasons farmers tend to be Republicans is that they are the opposite of that: independent-minded, uncomplaining, tough people who, season after season, continue in an uncertain enterprise that can flip on them overnight because they love the work.
But Donald Trump doesn’t love them back: he barely seems to know farmers are alive. And none of the Cabinet members tasked with the health of the agricultural economy have the courage to tell him the truth about what his policies really mean for America’s heartland—as well as prices at the grocery store.
Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.
