"In the Grip of Politics - Why America's Family Farms Are Going Under"

It's not just the interest rates. Not just the seed prices, not just the missing rain. It's a silent quake rippling through the rural regions of the United States - a structural tremor shaking family farms, tearing apart livelihoods, and driving a centuries-old culture into ruin. New figures from the University of Arkansas reveal how dramatically the situation is intensifying behind the scenes: over 250 farms filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy between April 2024 and March 2025 - an emergency mechanism for agricultural businesses that was once meant as a lifeline. Now it's become the norm. In the first quarter of 2025, the number of bankruptcies doubled compared to the previous year. Eighty-eight farms had to shut down in those three months alone. For Ryan Loy, an agricultural economist at the university, this is more than a statistical outlier. "What we're seeing here is a nationwide warning signal," he says. "The financial pressures increasingly resemble the crisis years of 2018 and 2019." Then, as now: rising costs, declining yields, political instability.

Because while production inputs like fertilizer and seed remain expensive, farmers are caught in a double interest-rate trap. Loans that were once financed at 3 or 4 percent now run at 7 to 9 percent. Those who want to invest anew face barely manageable burdens - especially young farmers who plunged into agriculture with heavy initial debts. "It's a pressure cooker," says Quinn Kendrick, general counsel for the agricultural investment firm Peoples Company. "If producer prices drop at the same time, bankruptcy often becomes the only way to even keep going." All this is happening against the backdrop of an intensifying labor shortage. Farms with labor-intensive operations - such as fruit, vegetables, or livestock - are sounding the alarm: they can no longer find harvest workers. The reasons lie not only in demographics but especially in the political climate. For months now, the immigration agency ICE has been conducting raids targeting undocumented workers in fields, barns, and packing plants. President Donald Trump briefly suspended the raids in June - under pressure from powerful agricultural lobbies. But the suspension was quietly reversed less than two weeks later. Since then, as one farmer put it, there's been a state of "permanent crisis mode" across the industry.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a close confidante of the president, expresses understanding - at least rhetorically. She said she has spoken to many farmers who are barely operating above the break-even line. "That’s not sustainable for third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation family farms," said Rollins. Still, she promises: at the end of this process, America's farmers would be the "greatest beneficiaries of the president's realignment." But to many, that sounds like mockery. Because what is touted as a "realignment" often means precisely the opposite in practice: deregulation in favor of corporations, collapsing export markets due to tariffs, the end of pandemic-related aid programs - and a political language that romanticizes the "independent farmer" while those very same farms are being destroyed by political indifference. For young farmers like Blake Hurts from Missouri, the pressure is barely bearable. "Those who went into debt to get into farming are now backed up against the wall," he says. The overall number of bankruptcies may not yet have reached 2019 levels - but the trend is unmistakable. And what the numbers don’t show are all those quietly abandoning their farms, selling off land, fleeing into side jobs, losing their once-cherished vocation to the machinery of the market. America’s fields are not empty. Not yet. But they sound hollow. Because what grows there now grows less and less out of trust - and more and more on credit. Many farmers could have learned from Donald Trump's first term - but they didn't. The warning signs were there: a president who destroyed export markets with tariffs, arbitrarily distributed farm subsidies, demonized migrants, and prioritized the interests of large corporations over those of family farms. And yet, many farmers placed their hopes in him again in 2024 - out of hope, out of defiance, out of a misguided belief in independence. That the current crisis is now so deep is also due to the fact that all those signals were ignored. Anyone who sees themselves as a provider for the nation carries responsibility - for the soil, for the people, for the common good. In that responsibility, the behavior of many came across as arrogant, unwise, and shortsighted. Today's harvest crisis - as bitter as it sounds - is to a large extent self-inflicted.