• Federal farm programs are fragmented and often ineffective, leaving farmers vulnerable to economic hardship.
• Recent spending cuts by the Trump administration have highlighted the precarious position of American farmers reliant on government support.
• The author calls for a bipartisan effort to reform farm programs, ensuring their effectiveness and sustainability for future generations.
It was so dry in the summer of 1976 that Wisconsin’s farmland broke into pieces. The earth fragmented, the choking fields warning of a barren harvest and so much more.
America’s small family farmers — my parents, our cousins down the road, and millions of others — were facing more than bad weather. One American president had swung wide open a market in the Soviet Union, urging farmers to get bigger so he could use selling food to Russia as leverage over the Communists. The next would slam that market shut when Russia invaded Afghanistan.
Farmers would, meantime, slip between the cracks.
Today we’re in danger of letting that happen again — and again and again. That’s what the worldwide controversy over President Donald Trump’s spending cuts shows us. Yes, the cuts are hitting farmers, but there’s an even deeper issue: After decades of failing to put America’s farmers first, our federal government is much like the ground our family faced in the 1970s. Farm programs are broken and fragmented, leaving countless gaps where American farmers can slip between the cracks. Fixing this requires much deeper change.
To summarize the immediate issue, efforts by Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut federal spending have demonstrated a variety of places where farmers are affected by the federal government. When the administration halted activity by the U.S. Agency for International Development, it risked stopping the purchase of billions in American farm products distributed as global food aid. When it froze spending under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, farmers who had signed contracts to do conservation work were suddenly in danger of not receiving promised money.
How these issues will play out is yet to be seen. The USAID issue changed rapidly, with Trump’s State Department arranging to continue shipments of American farm products, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announcing that various food aid programs would continue. But we still need to see how USAID’s fate affects these programs. Meanwhile, a court battle is ongoing over the legality of freezing Inflation Reduction Act spending.
This brings us to the deeper problem. Many American farmers agree with cutting spending, just like many applauded the president who opened the Russian market in the 1970s (Richard Nixon), and understood the next president showing Russia consequences a few years later (Jimmy Carter).
And yet that whiplash partially drove the 1980s Farm Crisis, along with the feds encouraging farm debt, then making it more expensive with higher interest rates. Notice the patten? The issue is not any one action, but the way our country’s policymaking has disregarded farmers for too long, scattering unexpected consequences across every farm field.
This fact is obscured by the large amount of government action supposedly taken on behalf of farmers. Since the Great Depression, the federal government has created myriad programs: price supports, direct payments, government-backed insurance, and more.
But even those programs show the problem. Over the years we’ve largely layered new programs on top of old ones, only rarely reforming them. Programs have become less effective over time, often favor certain industries (or types and sizes of farms) over others, and are prone to abuse by recipients who aren’t even farmers. The average taxpayer rightly asks where their money is going, and the average family farmer rightly asks why it seems support never really arrived.
The consequences go far beyond the farmyard. As we’ve lost our family farms despite all the supposed support (vanishing at an average rate of 45,000 farms per year since the 1920s), the American family has paid the price. Disruptions to our increasingly unstable food supply chain spiked food prices far beyond the rate of inflation.
What’s the answer? We need a bipartisan family farm moonshot — a monumental effort focusing policymakers on both sides of the aisle on what’s happening on the ground on our family farms, and how it affects our food supply. It should begin with a full review to determine the effectiveness of every farm program, inform the passage of long-term farm bills with deeper reforms (instead of the temporary patches congressional gridlock has allowed), and continue with ongoing reforms.
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These include ensuring technological advances stop leaving family farms behind, preventing anticompetitive markets, easing tax and regulatory burdens on small farms, encouraging a food system that better values fresh food from family farms, and more.
With all the decisions we’ve made that have wiped out farmers, the question isn’t whether there are things we can do to go the other direction — it’s whether we will.
Brian Reisinger is a writer who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County. He contributes columns and videos for the Ideas Lab at the Journal Sentinel, and is the author of“Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.” Reisinger works in public affairs consulting for Wisconsin-based Platform Communications. He splits his time between Sacramento, Calif. — America’s “farm-to-fork capital,” near his wife’s family — and the family farm in Wisconsin. You can find him on X at @BrianJReisinger…Read more by Brian Reisinger
