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agriculture
Decimated by Tariffs, US Farmers Warn Trump Bailout Not Nearly Enough to Erase Pain He Caused
"The average soybean acre in the United States this year is going to lose $109 an acre, and that's well over two dollars a bushel," said one farmer. "It's bloody."
Dec 22, 2025
President Donald Trump has announced a $12 billion relief package for US farmers hurt by his global trade war, but there are already signs that it will be woefully insufficient.
The Guardian reported on Monday that many US farmers are concerned that the bailout offered by the Trump administration won't come close to making up for the damage done by Trump's tariffs over the last nine months.
The report cited data from the American Farm Bureau showing that US crop farmers have collectively lost $34.6 billion this year, a total that is nearly three times the size of Trump's farm aid proposal.
Dan Wright, president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau, told the Guardian that Trump's plan is both too little to make up for lost sales and too late to prevent many farms from going under.
"A program that provides roughly $50 an acre will not save the thousands of family farms that will go bankrupt before the end of the year," Wright explained.
The Guardian noted that farms in Arkansas are expected to be hit particularly hard by bankruptcies this year, although farmers across the US report being under duress.
Ohio Capital Journal reported last week on new data from the Atlantic Council’s Tariff Tracker showing that Ohio farmers lost $76 million worth of exports to China this year after the Chinese government cut off all US soy purchases in retaliation for Trump restarting his trade war.
A Monday report from the Times-Picayune quoted Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture and Foresty Mike Strain saying recently that roughly half of Louisiana farmers "are facing significant challenges" in which they're dealing not only with lost sales to foreign nations, but also increased costs for supplies and equipment thanks to Trump's tariffs.
"The cost has gone up, but the price the farmers receive went down," Strain explained.
Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, chairman of the American Soybean Association, told Spectrum News 1 on Monday that soy farmers were bracing for major losses from their crops as they get hit from both sides by depressed soy prices and increased input costs.
"The average soybean acre in the United States this year is going to lose $109 an acre, and that's well over two dollars a bushel," Ragland explained. "It's bloody."
While China recently pledged to start buying more soy from US farmers, the country has been gradually increasing its reliance on Brazil and other countries so that it no longer has to deal with unpredictable US trade policies.
Andrew Muhammad, a professor of agricultural policy at the University of Tennessee, said in an interview with local public radio station WPLN that China's shift toward Latin American markets means it is no longer held hostage to Trump's whims, and it can now ensure a steady supply of soy regardless of the US president's tariff policies.
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Warning of Superbugs, Groups Urge Trump EPA to Ban Use of Important Drugs as Pesticides
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops," one expert said, calling out industry for the "recklessness and preventable suffering."
Nov 24, 2025
Just a month after the head of the World Health Organization warned that "antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide," a coalition of conservation, farmworker, and public health groups on Monday petitioned the Trump administration to ban the use of crucial drugs as pesticides.
The legal petition provides a list of "active ingredients that are themselves, or whose use can promote cross-resistance to, medically important antibiotics/antifungals," and requests that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cancel registrations under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of all products that contain them.
"Research is clear that the use of antibiotics and antifungals as pesticides poses a threat to public health because it contributes to the evolution of pathogens that are resistant to medicine," the petition states, referring to what are often called "superbugs."
"Petitioners make this request because of the critical nature of these drugs and drug classes to human and veterinary medicine, along with scientifically established concerns related to increasing resistance and declining efficacy rates as a result of prophylactic and other uses of these antimicrobials outside of the medical field," the filing continues.
"More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths."
Noting that the use of antibiotic pesticides also "directly threatens the well-being of humans and animals through contamination of food supplies and crops," the filing adds that "petitioners believe that the most effective way to safeguard human and environmental health is to disallow the use of these ingredients in pesticide products."
The petitioners are the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, Californians for Pesticide Reform, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, CRLA Foundation, Friends of the Earth US, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, UNI Center for Energy & Environmental Education, and US Public Interest Research Group.
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. "This kind of recklessness and preventable suffering is what happens when the industry has a stranglehold on the EPA's pesticide-approval process."
Donley and other campaigners have previously called out the Trump administration for spouting pesticide companies' talking points in the September Make America Healthy Again report, installing an ex-industry lobbyist in a key EPA post, and doubling down on herbicides including dicamba and atrazine—the latter of which is commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States, and last week was labeled probably carcinogenic to humans by a WHO agency.
Underscoring the urgent need for EPA action, the new petition highlights that "more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths," according to a 2019 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Citing another CDC report, the filing points out that "the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the issue due to longer hospital stays and increased inappropriate antibiotic use, leading to an upsurge in the number of bacterial antibiotic-resistant hospital-onset infections by 20%."
Globally, antimicrobial resistance "has increased in 40% of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored for global temporal trends between 2018 and 2023, with annual relative increases ranging from 5% to 15%," according to the WHO analysis released last month. By the end of that period, "approximately 1 in 6 laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections worldwide were caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics."
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that "we must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines. Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose, and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests."
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This Thanksgiving, Let’s Feed Families, Not Factory Farms
Nearly 70% of the grain grown in this country—corn, soy, wheat, and barley—never feeds a single human being. Instead, it’s fed to pigs, chickens, and cows packed into industrial animal factories.
Nov 24, 2025
As Americans gather around the table this Thanksgiving to show our gratitude and feast in abundance, we should ask ourselves a simple but uncomfortable question: Who—and what—are we really feeding in the US?
In the United States, the answer isn’t “people.” It’s corporate, industrial factory farms.
Nearly 70% of the grain grown in this country—corn, soy, wheat, and barley—never feeds a single human being. Instead, it’s fed to pigs, chickens, and cows packed into industrial animal factories. Only about one-quarter of US crops are eaten directly by people. That staggering imbalance makes factory farming the single biggest cause of food waste in America—a system that burns through farmland, water, and fossil fuels to produce less food, not more.
When we feed edible crops to animals, we lose up to 90% of their calories and protein before they ever reach a plate. For every 100 calories of animal feed fed into factory farm production, we get back only about 12 calories in meat or dairy. Meanwhile, 44 million Americans face food insecurity, and approximately 1 in 5 children in the US—nearly 14 million kids—are living with hunger.
By reducing the number of animals raised for food and shifting subsidies toward healthy, plant-based foods, we can create a food system that actually feeds people and supports family farmers instead of corporations.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The US government spends billions every year to prop up this wasteful system. Federal farm subsidies overwhelmingly flow to the corporations that grow feed for factory farms—corn and soy for industrial livestock—while fruits, vegetables, and legumes that could actually nourish people receive a fraction of that support.
In other words, your taxpayer dollars are funding food waste. We’re subsidizing the destruction of the environment, the suffering of animals, and the consolidation of rural America under corporate control.
This isn’t just an agricultural policy failure. It’s a moral one.
Feeding food to factory farms doesn’t feed the nation—it feeds the climate crisis. Industrial livestock is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases. The endless demand for feed crops drives soil depletion, fertilizer runoff, and water contamination across the Midwest, while fueling deforestation abroad for imported soy.
If we redirected even a fraction of those feed crops toward food crops, we could feed millions more Americans, free up farmland for restoration, and dramatically cut emissions. That’s what real climate-smart agriculture looks like—not doubling down on a broken system driving us toward extinction.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be about gratitude and generosity. But genuine gratitude means stewardship—using resources wisely, sharing abundance fairly, and respecting the lives, human and animal alike, that make our meals possible. There’s nothing thankful about wasting food and warming the planet to keep factory farms afloat.
We can choose a better way forward.
By reducing the number of animals raised for food and shifting subsidies toward healthy, plant-based foods, we can create a food system that actually feeds people and supports family farmers instead of corporations. Imagine if American agriculture rewarded farmers for growing beans, grains, fruits, and vegetables that nourish families, not for producing endless corn and soy to sustain industrial meat factories.
This Thanksgiving, let’s make gratitude mean something again. Because abundance isn’t about how much we produce—it’s about how wisely and compassionately we use what we have.
If we want a food system that truly feeds people, strengthens rural communities, and honors the spirit of Thanksgiving, the first step is simple: Stop feeding our food to factory farms.
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