Farmers across the country are issuing increasingly urgent warnings that they’ll face grim consequences if they don’t get help selling this year’s bumper crop that many have begun harvesting.
Trade deals many had hoped would quickly emerge after President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on some of the United States’ biggest agricultural customers haven’t come. A farm bailout is no sure thing on Capitol Hill. And farmers — many of whom voted for Trump — say time is running out.
“It just seems like things have stalled all summer long,” said Brian Warpup, who grows corn and soybeans on his 3,900-acre farm in northeastern Indiana. “We’re always hopeful that those negotiations are moving forward, but yet with harvest here, patience may be running thin.”
Across the US, farmers describe increasingly dire circumstances stemming from a confluence of factors — trade wars, Trump’s immigration crackdown, inflation and high interest rates.
Though the challenges vary in different parts of the country, farmers in some cases, particularly on the West Coast, are struggling to find labor to pick their harvest. Others, especially in the Midwest, said they can’t sell what they’ve produced. And many are scrambling to find storage.
It’s led to pressures reminiscent of the trade wars from Trump’s first administration, when the federal government spent billions on bailouts to farmers.
The world’s biggest soybean buyer, China, is so far this year refusing to purchase American soybeans — a critical export that the US Department of Agriculture said was worth nearly $25 billion last year — turning instead to Brazil as part of Beijing’s response to the tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods in February.
Brazilian soybeans are unloaded from a ship at Yantai Port in China’s Shandong province on June 17. – Tang Ke/VCG/Getty Images/File
That standoff has added to challenges farmers already faced entering the season: Prices of commodities are low compared to 2022 peaks, while prices for fertilizer, seeds and equipment are all up. High interest rates are exacerbating the financial squeeze.
What soybeans farmers can’t sell must be stored — and many say they’re short on grain bins. Warpup said he is rushing to sell corn that he’d typically store until spring to create room for more soybeans. Others could face even more costs as they pay for grain elevator storage.
Ryan Frieders, a corn and soybean farmer in Illinois, said the storage concerns are “like a tidal wave of problems coming towards Illinois.”
Farm bankruptcies could rise. They were up 55% last year, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Ryan Loy, an extension economist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture who tracks farm bankruptcies, said in July that farm bankruptcies were up again in the first quarter of 2025.
“It’s going to mean that there’s going to be farmers that are so far at the end of their rope, not able to meet their financial obligations,” said Caleb Ragland, a Kentucky soybean farmer and the president of the American Soybean Association, who has voted for Trump in every presidential election since 2016.
CDC data shows farmers already face higher suicide rates than the rest of the general population, something that Ragland says could unfortunately rear its head under the current situation. “They’re going to see farmers that choose to take their own lives,” Ragland said.
President Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House on September 11. – Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
‘We call it farmageddon’
Many farmers are looking to Washington — and Trump, who they overwhelmingly supported in last year’s election — for solutions.
Trump officials led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met this week with a Chinese delegation for trade talks in Madrid, Spain, though it’s not clear if the sides neared a deal that could lead to Chinese soybean purchases. Trump seemingly acknowledged the problem in a Truth Social post last month where he said he hoped China would “quickly quadruple its soybean orders.”
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes a $59 billion increase in spending over the next decade on farm safety net enhancements, as well as tax breaks for equipment. But congressional aides say those funding boosts won’t take effect until next year’s crop — and many farmers said they need more immediate assistance.
“This is not your ordinary farm crisis. We call it ‘farmageddon,’ and it’s really a tough time,” said Joe Jennings, the chief executive officer of Daitaas Holdings, a Memphis, Tennessee-based farm tech and software company.
On Capitol Hill, aides say there are discussions underway between lawmakers and Trump officials about helping farmers. The 2018 Farm Bill, extended twice, is set to expire September 30, though a new version of the legislation does not appear close to being finalized.
Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman has said “everything is on the table” to try to address the problem. “Our ongoing, constant efforts to gather farmers’ feedback have always proved tremendously helpful as we make clear to the administration and colleagues in Congress how serious the situation is in rural America,” the Arkansas Republican said in a statement to CNN.
Rep. Glenn Thompson, second from right, watches Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, foreground, speak during a press conference regarding a plan to protect American agriciluture outside the USDA Whitten Building on July 8. – Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images/File
Turning tariffs into bailouts
Lawmakers have floated some out-of-the-box fixes, too. House Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson suggested recently in an interview with trade publication Agri-Pulse there could be other ways for the government to step in, including using revenue collected from tariffs to help farmers.
But Democratic congressional aides say it’s not clear how such a plan would work, and it would likely need congressional approval. One path to helping farmers in financial need is the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a program that allows the government to help make up losses for farmers. The problem, the aides said, is that taking such a step would require the administration to acknowledge its trade policies are hurting farmers.
Congressional Democrats have argued that the quickest path to helping farmers is for Trump to end his trade war with China.
“Our farmers have spent generations building these export markets, only to have them closed off by haphazard tariffs,” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, told CNN in a statement. “We learned from the trade war during the President’s first term that these markets don’t come back overnight.”
Congressional Republicans have mostly avoided criticizing Trump’s trade war with China, and the House voted this past week for a provision that restricts Congress’ power to challenge Trump’s tariffs until next March.
But the problem is getting too big to ignore.
“Representing an Ag state, this has very direct consequences, particularly with regard to Asia because that’s such a big market — 60% of South Dakota soybeans are exported and mostly to China, and that market is now shut down,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview last week with Punchbowl News. “So, we’re going to have some real issues in farm country with regard to trade and markets more generally.”
‘Hush money to keep them sedated’
American farmers experienced the rockiness from American trade wars during Trump’s first term, too.
In 2018 and 2019, the first Trump administration paid billions to farmers who were hurt by trade wars the president had started. It was “hush money to keep them sedated,” said Chris Gibbs, an Ohio farmer who previously was the Shelby County Republican chairman and voted for Trump in 2016, but has switched parties and is now the county Democratic chairman.
A combine harvester cuts rows of corn during a harvest at a farm in Dockery, Mississippi, on August 14. – Alan Chin/Bloomberg/Getty Images/File
Still, in the 2024 election, farmers overwhelmingly backed Trump. He won rural voters by 40 percentage points, a Pew Research Center survey found.
Gibbs pointed to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ repeated promises that a “golden age of American agriculture” is coming.
“Well, farmers can’t wait any longer,” he said. “They’re squeezed on cash flow. They’re having trouble renewing loans — commodity loans. We’re in a mess — a cash flow mess. And farmers aren’t going to be able to pay the bills. So the administration needs to find some solutions.”
He said that leaving farmers begging for a bailout is antithetical to an industry that is at the core of America’s identity.
Farmers, Gibbs said, “are independent people. They are proud people. And the worst thing that they want to do is to come to the government for a bailout. Yet here we are once again.”
The Purdue University-CME Group Ag Economy Barometer Index, a monthly survey that measures farmer sentiment, found last month that America’s farmers — for the third consecutive month — feel less optimistic about the future of the agricultural economy, after that survey found farmer sentiment at a four-year high in May. That four-year high was driven in part by optimism that US agricultural exports would increase in the coming years.
The August survey found a sharp split between livestock producers, who are not seeing the same dramatic price drops and market closures, and crop operations.
Eric Euken, a seventh-generation farmer in western Iowa with 750 acres of corn and 600 acres of soybeans, said pigs and cattle are making up for what he is losing on corn and soybeans this year.
But, Euken said: “We don’t know what’s happening next from day to day.”
Euken, who said he voted for Trump over former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, but didn’t vote for Trump in 2020, said while he knew tariffs were coming, he “didn’t anticipate it being as bad as it is.”
“It is a tough situation right now with the lack of markets that we have, or places to market our crop,” Euken said. “And it’s kind of the government that put us in that situation. So I hate to pin it on the American taxpayer, but if they want us to survive, we are going to need some help.”
Still, he said, he isn’t sure Trump is willing to bail out farmers a second time — because to the term-limited Trump, he said, “it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The last time when we had bailouts, it was to his benefit to bail us out for future votes,” Euken said. “Buying a future vote is not going to help him one bit.”
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