Trump’s assault on small farmers

Laura Beth Resnick was delivering snapdragons and anemones to clients near the White House when she got the news: In his first wave of executive orders, President Donald Trump had frozen all projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, one of his predecessor’s signature achievements. Resnick was awaiting reimbursement for solar panels she’d purchased for her flower farm via the Rural Energy for America Program, which had received a $1 billion IRA injection to help farmers invest in renewable energy projects. Her frozen grant left her $36,000 in the hole.

Resnick pulled over, got out, and just started walking, shaky with adrenaline. “This sudden knowledge that we are on the hook for this money we don’t have—it’s so overwhelming,” she said in March.

Trump’s chaotic first months back in office—his flurry of orders, tariffs, and cuts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—have sent America’s farmers into a tailspin. Few farms were spared, but smaller and newer ones have been disproportionately harmed—with potentially far-reaching consequences for their communities. “I don’t think [the administration] knows enough about how the economy works to back up what they’re doing,” said Kevin Leavitt, an organic farmer in Maine whose own frozen funding threatened to tank his business (before his contract was honored in April). But “it would seem like they’re trying to create fewer farms.” 

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly Trump’s policies have disrupted farmers’ lives. According to DOGE’s (often dubious) “efficiency leaderboard,” the Department of Agriculture is among the federal agencies that have endured the deepest cuts. This spring, the USDA suspended billions of dollars in outstanding payments for at least 15 programs for farmers and rural communities. It also cut $1 billion destined for schools and food banks (another hit for the farmers who supply them), and gutted regional USDA offices, which provide a vital lifeline to farm country. Today, some farmers “may have to drive a hundred miles or more to get to an office,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has fired hundreds of workers and plans to slash its budget by 25 percent, which could jeopardize its ability to provide the accurate weather forecasts farmers rely on. And DOGE’s cuts to Bureau of Reclamation staff are so dramatic that water managers fear the government will be unable to operate the complex system of reservoirs, dams, and canals that supply Western farms. Compounding all of this are the tariffs Trump imposed on farmers’ top export markets; as of late April, two of them, China and Canada, had responded with their own tariffs of 125 percent and 25 percent, respectively, though many tariffs have since been suspended.

“Trade relationships are built over time,” said Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation corn and soybean farmer and the president of the Iowa Farmers’ Union. Farmers’ efforts, he added, “can be undone really, really quickly.” Some buyers never came back after the trade war in Trump’s first term. Now, many growers who depend on exporting crops like soybeans are concerned they could hemorrhage buyers again, as countries like China turn to farmers in Brazil and Argentina.

Small farms are uniquely vulnerable. The Biden administration had provided their owners with a range of grants that also advanced priorities such as climate reform, food security, and racial equity. In dismantling Biden’s policies, Trump left those farmers in the lurch. “Many smaller farmers or farmers of color who are just getting started, they don’t have a Plan B,” says Michelle Hughes, co–executive director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, which works closely with small farmers and farmers of color. “They don’t have generational wealth to rely on.”

As far as Trump’s trade war is concerned, large family and corporate farms, which are more likely to grow commodities like corn, wheat, and soybeans, are better positioned to withstand the financial chaos—and get some relief. Trump provided a $28 billion “bailout” to farmers damaged by his first-term tariffs, and may do it again. But that bailout focused on commodity growers, was distributed unevenly, and favored large producers; farmers still took a $27 billion hit from retaliatory tariffs, while multinational corporations walked away with over $100 million in bailout funds. Small farmers specializing in non-commodity crops were usually left in the dirt.

If small farms go belly-up, their land will be ripe for the taking. Over the past few decades, large agricultural operations and wealthy landowners have gobbled up an ever-greater share of the nation’s cropland, doubling the size of their holdings between 1987 and 2017. The costly tariffs and deep cuts to federal aid could accelerate the trend​​, as economic stressors force small and mid-sized farmers to sell. One need only to look at the trade war Trump initiated during his first term as evidence: farm bankruptcies spiked, jumping 24 percent from 2017 to 2018. 

The cuts will also almost certainly dial back environmental progress, which analysts worry would empower Big Ag and degrade rural communities. According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Lilliston, large agricultural operations tend to grow single commodity crop on large tracts of land, and that monoculture depletes the soil and relies on pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In Iowa, farm consolidation has coincided with a remarkable uptick in pollution. Thanks to runoff from nitrogen-based fertilizers, the state has one of the highest rates of nitrate pollution in the United States; it also has one of the nation’s highest cancer rates.

By accelerating farm consolidation, Trump’s policies will further hollow out rural communities. As large agricultural operations gobble up smaller ones, they displace middle class farm families and undermine mom-and-pop businesses; big growers tend to buy their supplies from multinationals, not local purveyors. “ It usually means fewer people in the town, fewer kids in school, fewer small businesses,” said Lilliston.

In the long term, the winner here could well be private equity at the expense of rural communities. The average American farmer is 57 years old. The scions of large, consolidated farms are often uninterested in running the family empire themselves. “Their kids move to Long Beach, and then they rent out the land to a capital asset manager in Chicago,” said Austin Frerick, an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy and the author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. Seven or eight years ago, Frerick had a conversation with a high level official at the Iowa Farm Bureau. “He said something I’ll never forget: ‘the future of Iowa is six towns and a bunch of driverless tractors.‘” Frerick said. The state is already trending in that direction, he says; farm towns are “slowly becoming ghost towns,” and most farmland in Iowa is now owned by non-Iowans. “Iowa’s just an extraction colony at this point.”

The irony is that rural communities have tended to be loyal supporters of the president: Nearly 78 percent of voters in the nation’s farm-dependent counties cast their ballot for Trump in 2024.

Resnick finally received her grant in April. Soon after, a federal judge ordered the White House to unfreeze IRA funding already allocated in states that sued. But for her, the damage is permanent. “My trust in the government,” she told me, “has been irrevocably broken.”