Fall is here, the harvest is coming in, but President Donald Trump’s trade war rages on and China won’t buy American farmers’ soybeans. That’s assuming that big farms can even find the labor to bring in their crops, which has been harder in the wake of Trump’s immigration raids, especially on the West Coast. In the eastern Arkansas Delta, the rice capital of the United States, farmers met to pray for government aid the way they might have prayed for rain in years gone by.
In response, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a meeting of state departments of agriculture this month that help was possibly on the way. Farmers may get it: It would hardly be the first time Trump bailed them out after wrecking their markets. The fact that it was a tough year for farmers was front of mind at this past weekend’s Farm Aid. Online, pundits and commentators have seemed confused about why farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the first place, treating it as another example of the working class voting against their interests.
But here’s the thing: Farmers aren’t working class. They’re often quite rich, actually. And they knew exactly what they were voting for.
President Jimmy Carter was the last farming president, which is fitting, because he was elected at the end of a steep decline in the number of American farms. The Great Depression reshaped the American landscape. It came with a crash in agricultural markets alongside the Dust Bowl—an ecological disaster that doomed many family farms. There were 6.8 million farms in the country in 1935, and fewer than a third were left by the end of the 1970s. The decline slowed after that, but fewer than two million farms remained in 2024. At the same time, the number of agriculturally dependent rural counties in the U.S. has also declined.
Most of the story of U.S. farming since then has been the rise of big agribusiness. But what about the family farms that remain? They are bigger. and the farmers who own them are wealthier. Families with commercial farms—that is to say those who make above $350,000 a year and who may actually earn enough through operating their dairies, wineries, or growing what they grow to support their families—had a median wealth of $3.6 million in 2023, according to the USDA.
Those are the exceptions. But the average farm overall still had $1,439,138 in wealth. Many of those farmers rely on off-farm income—meaning the families who own them work other jobs—and the land they use for grazing cattle or growing corn is more of a side hustle. The wealth comes from the land and capital investments, and the farm operations themselves often run at a loss, but those households have had higher median incomes than the national median every year since 1988. Many family farm proprietors have already inherited land from their families or otherwise have the money to invest.
Why would people with other jobs try running a small farm if it is more likely to lose money than to make it? There are many different answers: Perhaps their parents ran the farm and they want to continue their legacy, or they are hoping to leave their jobs and run the farm full-time if it ever works out. But another big reason is that using any significant land you have for agriculture comes with tax breaks and subsidies. Farmers might qualify for special considerations if they dedicate the land they already own to farming. If they lose money, the government might make them whole. Without that help, many may lose their farms.
So those farmers praying for government relief are used to it arriving when they need it. They rely on it. And they knew what they were bargaining for with Trump.
Sarah Taber, a farmer who ran for commissioner of agriculture in North Carolina as a Democrat last year, has a YouTube channel where she talks about these issues. In one recent dispatch, she pushed back on the notion that farmers were deceived. Trump campaigned on starting a trade war by raising tariffs, she said. “Everybody knew this was going to happen,” she said in the video. “Everybody in agriculture knew this was going to happen.”
When she spoke to farmers, they pointed to other benefits in electing Trump. Those included ending increased protections for farm labor under the Biden administration and rolling back environmental regulations. Earlier in the year, farmers celebrated some of the tax changes in the budget reconciliation bill, including an estate tax exemption that allows big farms to pass to future generations tax-free. Trump had also promised to mute the effects of his mass deportation scheme on agriculture.
What’s new is that the more destructive components of Trump’s agenda are hitting them now because they weren’t given special consideration, allowing them to try to pull on America’s heart strings as symbols of an agrarian past that is long gone. Arkansas Senator John Boozman is leading the way for a bailout for farmers this year, and some Democrats are promising help too. In her video, Taber expresses some skepticism: When Trump delivered aid before, he was running for reelection. He may be less dependent on keeping farmers in his corner now. “Here in agriculture, I thought we all knew that story about free milk and a cow. And, uh, he’s got the milk,” she said. “He don’t need to buy the cow.”
Taber suggested it might be time for the farmers of generations past to move on and let those new to agriculture try their luck and innovate. In the meantime, the real working class in the U.S., in rural areas and elsewhere, are the service workers clocking in at retail giants, or pink-collar assistants at rural hospitals—who are squeezed by low wages, few job protections, the end of government programs like Medicaid, and an affordability crisis that rages on. But they’re not part of a celebrated brand of Americana, and they have fewer champions.
The post Why Won’t Farmers Rebel Against Trumponomics? Because They’re Rich. appeared first on New Republic.
