The Price of Harvest – How Trump’s Policies Pushed America’s Farmers into the Abyss and Death

Nebraska – It is the silent end of a land that once thought of itself as the world’s granary. While Washington debates budget numbers, the fields of the Midwest sink into debt and despair. In Arkansas more than thirty percent of agricultural operations are at risk of disappearing, in Iowa families sell their machinery because the subsidies that once kept them afloat have been cut.

This crisis is not a natural event but political intent. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports have destroyed export markets while aid programs that under the previous administration still slowed the crash have been eliminated. It is the classic pattern of political cynicism: those who voted for him are now paying the price. In Nebraska the Farm Bureau has published a report describing the situation unvarnished. Average interest rates for agricultural loans are at 7.29 percent – the highest level in a decade. Corn financing costs more than eight dollars per acre, soybeans around four and a half. Land prices have risen fourteen percent since last year, and lease prices in irrigation zones are exploding. Cedar County now demands $355 per acre, twice as much as the western part of the state.

“These are not numbers, they are destinies,” says Mark McHargue, president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau. “When family farms fall, entire communities lose their foundation.”

Nebraska is increasingly moving out of Trump’s orbit. At a meeting of the Nebraska Farm Bureau, President Mark McHargue (third from right) shook hands with Iraqi Ambassador H.E. Nazar Al Khirullah (fourth from right) – a symbolic moment amid growing international cooperation. At the same table sat leading figures from precision agriculture, agricultural commodities and energy – representatives of a state that apparently no longer seeks its future in Washington but in its own responsibility.

Since 2020 the prices for replacement parts for agricultural machinery have increased by sixty-nine percent. A part that once cost six hundred dollars now costs almost two thousand. Fertilizers have become a luxury good: urea plus twenty-eight percent, ammonia plus twelve, DAP and MAP plus ten. For corn farmers fertilizer costs add up to more than $160 per acre – an increase of forty-five percent in just five years.

More than half of all agricultural enterprises in the United States are posting losses - an economic earthquake that shakes the foundations of rural America. The number of farm bankruptcies has risen by 56 percent in the twelve months to June - an increase that not only alarms but exposes: Donald Trump’s supposed “rescue policy” for America’s farmers is in truth their downfall. His punitive tariffs have destroyed export markets, his cuts to subsidies have pushed entire regions into the red, and his “America First” rhetoric has divided the country while the farms decay. What Trump promised farmers as a rebirth has turned out to be politically packaged ruin.

Trump’s administration remains silent. No aid programs, no emergency funds, no talks. Instead, a rhetoric of self-reliance – as if one could plow against global markets and political arbitrariness. The farmers who voted for him in overwhelming numbers now find that patriotism does not pay the bills.

In Arkansas trade war, inflation, and natural disasters coincide. Flooded fields, destroyed infrastructure, exploding diesel prices - and a president who claims that agriculture is “stronger than ever before.” The irony is hard to overlook: as recently as spring, 70 percent of American farmers said they believed Trump’s tariffs would help them in the long run. Many celebrated his “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which promises generous subsidies - subsidies that, however, will not be paid out until 2026. For thousands of farms that will be too late. “We need ad hoc payments immediately to survive this year,” demands farmer Derek Haigwood. It sounds like a cry for help, but it is also an admission that the self-celebrated trade war has now become a deadly embrace.

The scenes in the gymnasium fluctuate between devotion and accusation. “Dear God, we are so close to you because we work with your earth every day. We need help,” pleads a farmer. Nine suicides within sixteen months are reported by agricultural dealers in the region, eight of them in the last fourteen weeks - that is how deep the despair runs. Perhaps the money will come, perhaps not. They no longer believe Trump, and from the despair grows anger, also for the dead. Until then the farmers have only prayer - and the bitter realization that sometimes you reap exactly what you have sown.

In Iowa families sit at dinner and ask how long they can hold out. In Kansas machines stand for sale that no one can buy. Economist Abygail Streff describes it as an “interwoven cost trap.” Rising land values raise taxes, high interest rates make financing more expensive, costly energy and fertilizer eat up the last margins. The gross production value falls, total costs continue to rise. In 2024 the yield was five hundred thirty-five dollars per acre for soybeans, the costs were over six hundred. Every field brings a loss. Rural communities pay the price. When farmers give up, workshops, gas stations, and schools close. The dying of farms drags the country down with it. The myth of the independent farmer becomes a memory of a time when work still mattered and politics still meant something.

“We need trade, not hero speeches,” says McHargue. He calls for the expansion of export markets, the reauthorization of E15 fuel, and more support for livestock producers. But nothing comes from Washington. Trump’s economic advisers speak of “self-healing forces of the market,” while in Nebraska entire generations are losing their livelihoods. America’s family farms stand on the brink of economic collapse: the costs for seed, fertilizer, and energy have risen by 30 percent, while producer prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat have fallen dramatically. Meanwhile the number of farm bankruptcies has risen by more than 50 percent.

What sounds sober like market mechanisms is in truth the result of political decisions. Since Trump’s return to office not only have the subsidies that under President Biden served as a safety net for farmers been cut, but key export agreements have also been dismantled. His new punitive tariffs have hit precisely those regions that still cheered him in 2024: the rural heart of America.

In Tennessee farmers like Jeffrey Daniels and Franklin Carmack are struggling with combined losses of almost eight hundred thousand dollars this year alone. In Iowa and Arkansas many have already filed for bankruptcy because foreign markets for soybeans have collapsed and government aid programs have been cut. The forecasts are devastating: one third of farmers in Arkansas are likely to go bankrupt by next year if no emergency loans are granted.

What Trump sells as an “America First” strategy means for the rural population: higher loan interest rates, more expensive machinery, rising rent, and a ruined export market. Family farms that have existed for generations are now falling into a debt trap that they can no longer escape on their own. Thus the policy that supposedly protects the “true America” divides precisely those who sustain it. While agricultural banks in Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa report rising defaults, entire counties are on the verge of losing their economic base. The American dream of owning one’s land - under Trump it becomes a nightmare of tariffs, interest rates, and foreclosures.

What is happening in the fields of Iowa, Arkansas, and Nebraska is not merely an economic crisis. It is a moral failure. A country that abandons its providers loses more than harvests - it loses itself. The farmers who believed in making America great now experience how it makes them small, even unto death.