As the White House’s new $12 billion farm aid package takes shape, the program highlights how Trump-era trade policies and immigration enforcement have helped fuel the current farm crisis, while longstanding racial inequities in USDA support mean white farmers—Trump’s most loyal agricultural base—stand to benefit the most.
The $12 billion farm aid package, announced by President Donald Trump in early December, is being financed through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a taxpayer-backed entity, even as Trump repeatedly links the assistance to tariff revenues.
According to multiple agricultural economists, the bailout is aimed at alleviating a crisis that has been exacerbated by the administration’s trade wars and tariff policies. Farmers are projected to lose roughly $44 billion in profits in 2025, in large part because of Trump administration actions that have raised input costs and disrupted export markets.
Trade disputes and retaliatory tariffs have sharply reduced U.S. agricultural exports, particularly soybeans. As The Nation reports, U.S. farm exports to China fell from about $19.5 billion to $9 billion in the years after Trump’s first-term trade wars began, contributing to an overall $27 billion decline in agricultural exports, with nearly 71 percent of those losses tied to soybeans. China, historically the top buyer of U.S. soybeans, paused all soybean purchases from May to October of this year before partially resuming imports, a halt that various estimates put at more than $12 billion in lost sales compared with the prior year.
Caleb Ragland, a Kentucky farmer who is president of the American Soybean Association and an outspoken Trump supporter, has described the administration’s tariffs as an “artificial barrier” to American farmers’ success—arguing that the policy has created a man-made farm crisis even as his members seek relief through the new bailout.
Labor pressures have mounted alongside trade shocks. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation raids have intensified farmworker shortages, particularly because more than 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, according to USDA data cited by The Nation. At the same time, advocates and Democratic lawmakers warn that Trump-backed efforts to limit or cut nutrition programs such as SNAP, school meal programs and food bank support have weakened once reliable domestic outlets for farm products.
Those combined pressures—higher input costs amid inflation, reduced export demand, and tighter labor supplies—have contributed to a rise in farm bankruptcies, foreclosures and suicides, according to reporting compiled by The Nation from farm groups, state farm bureaus and agricultural researchers.
The political backdrop is central to how the aid is being received. The Nation, drawing on data from Investigate Midwest and other outlets, reports that Trump won a majority of the country’s 444 USDA-designated “farming-dependent” counties in his earlier campaigns and has consistently enjoyed overwhelming backing from white farmers. Support for Trump among farmers rose to roughly 76 percent in 2020 and about 78 percent in 2024, according to those analyses.
By contrast, Black farmers have largely supported Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris. John Boyd Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told The Nation that most Black farmers backed Harris, while “white farmers—99.9 percent—voted Trump,” underscoring a deep racial and partisan divide in rural America.
Boyd and other advocates point to a long history of discrimination within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federal studies and civil-rights investigations have documented that Black farmers lost an estimated 16 million acres of land over the 20th century, much of it tied to discriminatory lending, delayed assistance, and hostile local enforcement. In 1910, roughly 14 percent of U.S. farmers were Black; today, about 1 percent are, according to historical Census data cited by The Nation and earlier Associated Press investigations.
A CNN investigation cited in The Nation found that in 2021 the USDA rejected about 42 percent of loan applications from Black farmers—roughly double the rejection rate for white farmers and higher than for any other racial group. Former USDA official Lloyd Wright, who led the department’s Office of Civil Rights under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, told The Nation that “if the Department of Agriculture did not exist, Black farmers would be better off,” arguing that decades of unequal treatment have left Black producers consistently disadvantaged.
The Biden administration in 2021 sought to address some of this history by proposing roughly $4 billion in debt relief for Black and other socially disadvantaged farmers. That initiative was quickly halted after a series of lawsuits, primarily backed by white farmers and conservative legal groups, argued the program amounted to unconstitutional “reverse racism.” Courts issued injunctions blocking the relief before it could be fully implemented.
Racial disparities also shaped Trump’s earlier trade-related farm bailouts. The New York Times has estimated that the administration’s first-term farm aid for trade-affected producers totaled nearly $23 billion. Because those payments were based largely on crop size and production, they disproportionately flowed to larger and wealthier operations, which are predominantly white, an analysis by The Counter found. Nearly all of the bailout payments went to white farmers or counties where white producers received the overwhelming share of funds.
Boyd, who farms about 2,000 acres in Virginia, told The Nation that Black farmers often work their own land without hired migrant crews, while large white-owned operations in his region depend heavily on immigrant labor. He argues that Trump’s mass-deportation rhetoric and enforcement posture have helped create the labor shortages now pinching those larger farms.
“The labor shortage? You need to thank this president for it,” Boyd said in the article, adding that the same white farmers who opposed Black debt relief are now demanding federal checks. “I’m a very religious man, and I’m going to say it: You reap what you sow.”
The new $12 billion program follows earlier aid rounds and arrives as Trump again emphasizes his personal affinity with farm country. During recent public events, he has repeatedly said that he “loves” farmers and portrays the payments as a reward for their loyalty and sacrifice in his trade battles. At the same time, he has floated the possibility of additional tariffs on some agricultural imports, even as many producers and economists contend that unwinding existing trade conflicts would do more to stabilize farm income than another round of emergency subsidies.
