Real Farms are Having a Real Crisis
While American soybeans rotted in storage, China bought from Brazil and Argentina, and Washington bailed out Argentina. Farm bankruptcies climbed 46 percent.
Republicans own the word “farmer” the way they own the word “freedom.” A prop. A costume worn at county fairs and in front of grain elevators. The last twelve months made the costume hard to wear.
Eighty-six percent of American farms are small family operations. (The USDA draws the line at $350,000 in gross cash farm income. Below that, you are small. Most of the country’s 1.9 million farms are below that.) These are the farms the party swears it protects. These are the farms folding.
The collapse had a setup. It did not come from nowhere.
By the time Trump took the oath again, margins were already thin. Commodity prices had slid off their 2022 highs. Corn, soybeans, wheat, all selling for less. Costs did not follow the prices down. Fertilizer, fuel, machinery, repairs, insurance, labor, all of it stayed expensive. Interest rates climbed, and a small farm feels that more than a big one, because there is less ground to spread the cost across. The weather took its cut, drought in some counties, flood in others. Land values and property taxes kept rising regardless.
And when the margin tightens, scale wins. The big operation has lower costs per bushel, better terms at the bank, first call on the new equipment. The small farm has none of that. It just has the squeeze.
That was the inheritance. Tight, but survivable. The kind of year a careful steward nurses a farm through.
Then came the trade war.
In the spring of 2025 the administration picked a fight with China and handed farmers the bill. China stopped buying American soybeans in May and stayed out through the harvest. Half the U.S. soybean crop is exported, and China had long been the largest buyer, $12.6 billion worth in 2024. The crop went into storage and stayed there, tarps over piles in the yard. Soybeans crashed below $8.50 a bushel in the Northern Plains. It costs better than $12 a bushel to grow them. Growers were looking at losses near $109 an acre, a third straight year of red ink.
China did not go hungry. It bought from Brazil and Argentina, which carry no retaliatory tariff and now sit on a glut. American farm exports to China fell from a $38 billion peak in 2022 to $8 billion in 2025. Soybeans alone went from roughly $18 billion to $3 billion.
Then the administration, having broken the market, announced a $20 billion lifeline. Not for the soybean farmer. For Argentina. (Treasury called it a stabilization package. The soybean farmer called it what it was, a check written to his competition.) Trump dangled a separate bailout for American growers, $12 billion, maybe $10 billion, funded out of the tariff revenue the same farmers had been paying into all year. The government collected around $215 billion in tariffs in fiscal 2025. A tax on Americans, dressed up as toughness on Beijing.
The rescue got top billing. After a summit with Xi, the White House announced China would buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans to close out 2025, less than half what it took in 2024, and 25 million tons a year after that. That second number is roughly what China bought before the trade war began. A year of carnage, and the prize was a return to the starting line, market share handed to Brazil along the way. China was slow to buy even that.
The wars made it worse.
Trump spent this, his second year, ordering strikes. Iran’s nuclear sites. Yemen. Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia. In early 2026 the United States had bombed Venezuela and hauled off its president. The Pentagon put the cost of the Iran campaign alone near $29 billion. Trump bragged that seized Venezuelan oil had covered it twenty-five times over. The oil markets did not share his confidence. A threatened Strait of Hormuz and strikes on fuel depots sent crude up. Farm diesel hit $5.41 a gallon in May, up 95 percent in a year. A farm runs on diesel. The tractor does not follow the geopolitics. It just costs twice as much to fill.
Put it together and the numbers arrive on schedule.
Farm bankruptcies rose 46 percent in 2025, to 315 filings, the second straight year of increase. The Midwest was up 70 percent, the Southeast up 69. Arkansas led the country with 33, the most in the state this century. Wisconsin filings rose 700 percent. Iowa rose 220. (Chapter 12 understates the damage, because it requires earning most of your income from farming, and many of these households long ago took town jobs to keep the place. Those families do not file. They just sell the land.) More than 160,000 farms closed between 2017 and 2024. Another year of losses is forecast on top of that.
Which brings us to Brooke Rollins.
Rollins is the Secretary of Agriculture. She is not a farmer. She ran the Texas Public Policy Foundation and then the America First Policy Institute, two think tanks devoted to the proposition that government should do less. She arrived at the USDA and proved it, teaming with the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency to cut the department she runs. She has a degree in agricultural development and a 4-H childhood, which the party offers as credentials. It is not the same as making payroll on a farm.
Last fall she sat before the House Agriculture Committee and said the quiet part. “We have failed you.” Her own words, to the farmers she serves.
It did not improve. Back before the committee this spring, she could not answer basic questions about the farm economy. Asked what share of farmers could not afford fertilizer this planting season, she recited categories of fertilizer instead of a number. The number was 70 percent. The Farm Bureau had it, off a survey of more than 5,700 farmers. The Secretary of Agriculture did not. When she reached for the standard defense and blamed the previous administration, Representative Angie Craig reminded her that Joe Biden is not the president, that her party runs Congress, and that the numbers belong to her now.
They do.
This is the record. A 46 percent jump in bankruptcies, a soybean market handed to Brazil, diesel at twice the price, a competitor bailed out ahead of the farmer, and a Secretary who admits the failure and cannot describe it. The party that claims the word “farmer” spent a year proving it does not know what the word costs.
