Bluesky

On Monday, Donald Trump announced that his administration will give farmers a $12 billion bailout—a tacit admission that his trade policies suck. Farmers have spent much of the last year complaining about rising production costs, falling crop prices and the loss of multiple markets due to Trump’s tariffs and the trade wars they have launched. All in all, farmers are projected to lose roughly $44 billion in profits this year, in large part because of Trump administration policies. Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association, has called Trump’s trade tariffs an “artificial barrier” to American farmers’ success—essentially, a man-made farming crisis.

But the truth is, it’s also a crisis of farmers’—specifically, white farmers’—own choosing.

“Most of the Black farmers in this country voted for Kamala Harris. I endorsed Harris publicly,” John Boyd Jr., the founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told me. “White farmers—99.9 percent voted Trump.”

Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.

“So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.

Indeed all of those issues, always of concern for farmers, have been on the rise. Increases in costs for seed, fuel, and fertilizer have been further compounded by sky-high and steadily climbing inflation. Already-low crop prices have plummeted thanks to Trump’s renewed trade wars, and China—normally American soybean farmers’ biggest customer—paused all soybean purchases from May to October, a loss of more than $12 billion from last year. ICE deportation raids targeting farm workers, more than 40 percent of whom are undocumented, have led to widespread farmworker labor shortages. And once reliable markets have been destroyed by the Trump administration’s cuts to food and nutrition programs that include SNAP, schools and food banks.

Consequently, white farmers have become frequent, if unexpected, news talking heads, using their appearances to express fears of a looming farm crisis while calling for a bailout. In September, video of Arkansas farmers literally praying to God for a miracle in the form of a government check went viral on social media. Farmers, and more specifically white farmers, have literally been begging for government handouts.

“President Trump, we’ve had your back,” Ragland told the Associated Press in September. “We need you to have ours now.’”

Those farmers simply “need a level playing field so we can compete,” in Ragland’s words. The bitter irony of his words can’t be overstated. The playing field has been titled in favor of white farmers for so long, and at an overtly steep angle, the better to ensure that Black farmers are forced right off it. The Department of Agriculture’s long, confessed history of racist loan rejections and delays of aid to Black farmers has, conservatively, resulted in 16 million—million!—acres of black land being stolen by the agency. In 1910, roughly 14 percent of farmers were black; along with the KKK, “white cappers” and other extrajudicial arbiters of white-terror violence who chased Black agrarians off their farm (tens of thousands more acres that were stolen, according to an AP investigation), the USDA’s land theft helped drive that down to just 1 percent today. The agency’s racist land grabs have been documented in multiple federal studies, including by the USDA itself, captured in government reports dating to 1965. The theft of Black farmland, though, dates back to a century before that.

Finally, in 2021, the Biden administration announced $4 billion for debt forgiveness to Black farmers. The response from white farmers around the country? A slew of lawsuits to stop that relief, contending that it amounted to “reverse racism.” Never mind that debt forgiveness would not, and could not, ever make up for the land taken nor the $350 billion estimated worth of that land that was stolen. Nor would it ever make up for the incalculable amount of Black generational wealth pilfered, the trauma inflicted, and the lives destroyed. But it was, at least, the tiniest crumb of recompense, and an uncharacteristically American attempt to recognize long-standing federal wrongdoing. But with help from Trump adviser Stephen Miller, white farmers mounted a legal counteroffensive, filing at least 13 separate suits and declaring that scrapping debt amassed because of the USDA’s systemic racism was “just wrong.” Those suits, and the court-ordered injunctions that resulted, put a stop to the program before it had even begun.

Racism within the USDA, however, never ended. The New York Times estimates that the Trump administration’s bailout for farmers harmed by the trade wars of his first term amounted to nearly $23 billion. “But because those payments were based on a farmer’s crop size,” the Times notes, “much of the money ended up going to larger and wealthier farmers, who are disproportionately white.” In fact, an analysis by food investigation outlet The Counter found that “nearly 100 percent of the bailout payments disproportionately benefited white farmers.” Racism in the past begets ongoing inequality. What’s more, a CNN investigation found that, even under Biden in 2021, the USDA rejected 42 percent of Black farmer loan applications—double the rejection rate of white farmers, and more than any other group racial group.

“I tell folks that if the Department of Agriculture did not exist, Black farmers would be better off,” Lloyd Wright, who worked at USDA for nearly four decades, including heading its Civil Rights Office under Presidents Clinton and Obama, told me. “Because then all farmers would be in trouble together at the same time. But when you consistently help one group and not the other—even if you don’t give them enough—those that you help are always going to be in better shape than those who didn’t get it.”

And still, white farmers voted for a president they knew would ensure that the ground stayed slanted beneath them. They voted for a president who ran on nary a policy save for the same tariffs that cost them billions the first time around, and mass deportations, despite agriculture’s dependence on undocumented laborers. And here again, race is unavoidably linked to the conversation. Boyd, who farms 2,000 acres in Virginia, and Wright both told me that nearly every Black farmer works the land themselves, because most have small farms—also a consequence of USDA racism. “The labor shortage? You need to thank this president for it,” Boyd told me. “Black farmers, we ain’t got no migrant workers. But every large-scale white farm in my county, and in Virginia, uses migrant labor.”

Boyd notes that many of his older white neighbors now don’t have the help they relied on, and that they complain about it, along with the economic strain engendered by Trump’s tariffs.

“Now all of a sudden, it’s bad and people should feel sorry for them,” Boyd said. “But what about when we didn’t get our $5 billion in debt relief? What about when I was out here on every media circuit, begging and pleading for help and white farmers sued in federal court. I’m a very religious man, and I’m going to say it: Dammit—you reap what you sow. They dumped on us—they didn’t have to dump on us. They could’ve said, “Well, you know what? These Black farmers were mistreated badly. So what if they get debt relief and some of their land out of inventory? But they didn’t do that. And our organization spent almost every dime we had defending that debt relief.”

White farmers routinely paint themselves as principled “trade, not aid” holdouts, the kind of people who would never accept a handout. Except, of course, when they do—even when it’s way beyond their losses. In fact, the bailout Trump gave white farmers in his first term might explain why they were so eager to get him back in office. David Frum cites a study from the American Enterprise Institute (no left-leaning entity) that suggests “soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices.” If you make money off Trump’s failures, but he pays you to keep voting for him, why wouldn’t you want him back in office? Politico was basically predicting the future when it worried back in 2020 that the Trump administration’s making it rain on white farmers might “risk creating a culture of dependency.”

Sure seems like that has happened, judging from the entitled statements and demands that have poured out of white farmers, who keep insisting they would never take a government check even as they demand yet another payday.

“They have no choice but to mail us a check,” an Arkansas farmer named Scott Brown told local outlet KAIT after the September meeting. “I don’t know a farmer that likes the check program. Nobody wants to take the taxpayer dollars, but nobody wants to go broke; nobody wants to lose everything.”

“Mr. Trump, you looked at me and said, ‘I love you,’” Ohio farmer Chris King wrote in the Sidney Daily News. “Mr. Trump, I need to see the fruit of your love.”

“If push comes to shove, and they have to pick between getting an additional stimulus check of some kind from the government, or losing their farm, they’ll take the stimulus check,” Nebraska Farmers Union John Hansen said. “They won’t like it, but it’s better than losing the farm.”

“I’ll take the money if it comes,” Iowa farmer Mark Heckman wrote in an October Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “American Farmers Want Fair Trade, Not Handouts,” “but it isn’t what farmers want.”

It would be nice if, instead of simply perpetuating this contrived, and inaccurate, image of white farmers as tragically, even heroically, forced to take a payout, a single reporter would ask one of the many white farmers on the news lately whom they voted for. As a country and a culture, we are loath to ask white people to confront the consequences of their own actions, but it would’ve been nice to see it just. this. once.

In any case, their demands have now been met. Politico notes that the $12 billion in bailout money comes “from a USDA fund using taxpayer dollars, even though the president repeatedly said during the roundtable that the bailout was funded by tariffs.” He also—far from suggesting he might reconsider tariffs since they’re obviously a losing policy—mentioned that he may “impose additional levies to slow imports of rice from China and India,” according to The New York Times.

“I will be surprised if this bailout is different,” Wright told me, echoing the sentiments of most Black farmers,a who, recognizing history as precedent, don’t expect to see much of the aid. “It’ll be the same old story.”

It’s true that farming is hard. Every farmer must contend with bad weather, unpredictable crop prices, surging inflation—and, under this president, tariffs. But only Black farmers must struggle against a Department of Agriculture that stands against them.

“We love our farmers,” Trump said at the same White House event where he announced the bailout, per NPR. “And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else.”

That’s certainly true for white farmers. And with the latest payout, looks like that won’t be changing anytime soon.