Republished with permission from Robyn O’Brien

I need you to sit with something for a moment. The people feeding this country, the ones waking before sunrise, watching the sky for rain, passing land down through generations, are in crisis. Not the kind of crisis that makes headlines easily, because there are no explosions, no visible rubble. Just quiet, grinding financial pressure. Foreclosure notices. Sleepless nights. And sometimes, unbearable despair.

As a former Wall Street analyst and a mother of four, I’ve spent years following the data that connects our food system to the health of our families, our economy, and our communities. I am also named after a farmer who is both a cancer survivor and the mother of a cancer survivor. And what I’m seeing right now is a convergence of policy decisions, tariffs, immigration crackdowns, energy freezes, budget cuts, landing simultaneously on the backs of the very people who grow our food.

This isn’t political talking points. This is the balance sheet of the American farm, and it is in crisis. Here are twelve things you need to know.

1. The Trade War Is Back, And This Time It Cuts Deeper

Now we are in round two, and economists say this iteration is worse. In March 2025, Beijing suspended import licenses for several major U.S. soybean exporters following a new round of American tariffs on Chinese goods. A deal struck in October 2025 promised China would purchase 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually, but before the first trade war, China was buying 30 to 36 million metric tons a year. That gap is not a negotiating footnote. It’s lost income for farmers across the Midwest. And for farmers looking to transition away from conventional soybeans to regenerative and organic agriculture, this type of financial pressure makes it even harder

2. Every Country We Taxed Has Taxed Us Back, Through the Farm

Since 2022, the United States has crossed a threshold almost no one is talking about: we are now importing more agricultural goods than we export, by value. The country that has long fed the world is importing more food than it sells abroad. A widening agricultural trade deficit is not a strength. It is a warning signal and a national security risk, and it is flashing red right now.

“Any economist worth their salt predicted that this tariff policy was going to lead to inflationary pressure and hurt our farm sector, especially because it’s a very export-oriented sector of the economy.” Harry Kaiser, Cornell University

3. The Strait of Hormuz Is Now a Kitchen Table Issue

At the same time, diesel, which farmers burn at two to six gallons per acre every growing season, hit $4.92 per gallon nationally in March 2026. That’s up from $3.59 just one year earlier. A 37 percent increase in fuel costs doesn’t just trim margins. On a farm already operating near breakeven, it can tip the entire operation into the red. These aren’t abstract commodity fluctuations. They are the difference between planting a crop and selling the land.

4. American Farm Debt Is Heading Toward a Record $624 Billion

The average operating loan in 2025 was 30 percent larger than in 2024, with repayment terms stretching three months longer. Forty percent more new farm operating loans were opened in the final quarter of 2025 than a year prior. Lenders, rather than calling in loans, are quietly extending terms, pushing the reckoning down the road. This is not a signal of a healthy sector managing through a rough patch. This is a signal of systematic, structural distress being deferred. And deferred distress always comes due.

5. Farm Bankruptcies Surged 46%, and the Worst May Be Ahead

Fifteen thousand farms closed entirely in 2025, bringing the national count to 1.865 million, and not a single state saw its farm count increase. The farms that close don’t just disappear. They get absorbed by larger corporate operations, accelerating the consolidation of America’s food production into fewer and fewer hands. Seventy-two percent of agricultural economists surveyed expect this consolidation to accelerate. We are watching the slow disappearance of the family farm in real time.

6. Behind Every Foreclosure Notice Is a Human Being, and We Are Losing Them

Farmers in this country die by suicide at a rate 3.5 times higher than the general working population, according to the CDC. The suicide rate for male farmers is 43.2 per 100,000, compared to 22.5 for the general male population.

Sixty percent of farmer suicide victims had no prior mental health diagnosis. They suffered in silence, because in farming communities, asking for help has long carried a stigma that feels as heavy as debt itself. Rural isolation, access to firearms and chemicals, and a culture of stoic endurance create a perfect storm. When a farm faces foreclosure, when a family legacy built over generations is threatened, when the weather, the markets, and the government all seem to be working against you at once , the weight becomes unbearable for some. We cannot talk about the farm crisis without talking about the human cost. We cannot let these numbers stay abstract.

“When the future of the farm feels threatened, stress can sink into despair.” , Oklahoma Farm Report, 2025. Financial stress is not just an economic emergency. For too many farm families, it has become a matter of life and death.

7. The Immigration Crackdown Is Emptying the Fields

The current administration’s aggressive deportation policies have driven workers away from farms and introduced paralyzing uncertainty. Farmers who turn to the legal H-2A guest worker program face costs that are prohibitive for small operations: they must pay a federally mandated wage more than double the minimum wage, provide free housing, and arrange transportation. Large agribusinesses can absorb that. The family farm in Wisconsin or Georgia often cannot. The fields aren’t just losing workers. They’re losing the capacity to harvest what’s already in the ground.

8. The Lifelines Are Being Cut, One by One

In August 2025, a Treasury Department policy change froze billions in rural renewable energy investment, pushing projects into limbo across the Midwest. At the same time, the USDA began disrupting, delaying, and canceling contracts with farmers and farm-serving organizations. In April 2026, the President proposed cutting an additional $5 billion from the USDA , roughly 20 percent of the agency’s entire budget. Programs supporting organic transition, rural business development, and conservation are all on the chopping block.

9. The People Who Need Food Are Losing the Support to Buy It

SNAP dollars don’t just feed families. They circulate directly back into local food economies, supporting the farmers markets, small grocers, and regional producers who often operate on the thinnest margins. When 2.5 million people lose food assistance, the ripple reaches the farm. And we are being asked to make peace with the fact that we can no longer officially measure hunger in America , not because the problem has been solved, but because we’ve stopped looking.

10. The Threat to Your Dinner Table Has Never Been More Real

The structural fragility of our food system is no longer a future risk. It is a present reality. We have fewer farms. They carry more debt. They have less labor. Their export markets are shrinking. Their input costs are rising. Their government support is being cut. And the people growing our food are experiencing a mental health crisis that too few people in power are willing to name out loud.

Food security is national security. The resilience of the American food supply depends on the resilience of the American farmer, and right now, that resilience is being tested at every level simultaneously. And young people are turning away from farming creating, what farming families call, a generational risk.

What happens to the farm does not stay on the farm. It shows up on your grocery receipt, in your community, in the stories of families who’ve worked the land for a hundred years and are now wondering if they can make it through one more season.

We have a choice about what kind of food system we want. But first, we have to be willing to look clearly at the one we have.

11. The People Healing the Land Had the Rug Pulled Out From Under Them

The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, a $3.1 billion, five-year investment in 141 projects covering more than 14,000 farms and 3.2 million acres, was frozen on the day Trump took office, and officially cancelled in April 2025. Organizations like Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, which was running a $40 million project across 15 states, received termination letters while farmers were mid-implementation, having already invested their own time and money. At the same time, the $85 million Organic Market Development Grant program and the $100 million Transition to the Organic Partnership Program were both paused, even as federal courts ordered the administration to release funds. The National Organic Program itself lost roughly one-third of its staff. These are not line items in a budget. They are the structural support systems that allowed farmers to take the leap toward something better. Cancelling them mid-leap is not efficiency. It’s abandonment.

“USDA funding, quite frankly, has been transformative for the regenerative agriculture movement. It’s a critical source of support, and if we see that it’s not continuing, it will certainly have significant ripple effects throughout the agriculture sector.” Ellen Griswold, Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment

12. Mid-Transition Farmers Are the Most Vulnerable and the Most Forgotten

One farmer in Pennsylvania invested $8,000 of his own money to secure water infrastructure for grass-fed livestock, applied for transition support through a PCSC partner, and was left in limbo when the program was frozen. Across the country, farmers had enrolled in multi-year projects, completed year one or two of five, and were waiting on reimbursement payments that never arrived. Organizations had hired staff, built partnerships, enrolled hundreds of farms then received cancellation letters with no timeline, no appeals process, and no reimbursement for completed work. And the $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program announced in December 2025 as a replacement, while welcomed in principle, is less than a quarter of what was cancelled. And it is being administered by an agency that has lost nearly 25 percent of its conservation staff and does not require the reduction in synthetic pesticides that defines true regenerative practice.

The Change Does Not Start in Washington. It Starts With Us.

I’ve spent my career believing that informed people make better decisions, as consumers, as investors, as citizens, and as voters. It began when my youngest had a life-threatening allergic reaction, and it will always be my call to action.

The farm crisis unfolding across this country is not inevitable. It is a consequence of choices, and choices can be changed.

Support farmers directly when you can, at the farmers market, through CSAs, through brands that pay fair prices to the people growing your food. Demand transparency. Ask where your food comes from. Push your representatives to prioritize a food system that is durable, equitable, and grounded in the long-term health of the land and the people who tend it.

And there is one more piece of this picture that must be named because it shapes everything else. The USDA, the federal agency whose entire purpose is to serve American farmers, is being hollowed out in plain sight.

Since January 2025, more than 15,000 USDA employees have left through deferred resignation and early retirement offers. Nearly 2,000 additional staff have been lost from research agencies alone, delaying grant programs, deferring data collection, and in some cases skipping entire fiscal-year research cycles altogether.

In July 2025, Secretary Rollins announced a sweeping reorganization plan, drafted without farmer input, that will relocate up to 2,600 of the remaining Washington-area staff to five regional hubs in cities like Indianapolis, Kansas City, Fort Collins, Raleigh, and Salt Lake City. Secretary Rollins herself has publicly stated she expects up to half of those employees to quit rather than move.

When USDA tried this same approach in 2019, relocating two offices to Kansas City, it lost more than half of its affected staff and saw significant drops in productivity. The department is now repeating that experiment at many times the scale, at the worst possible moment, with a workforce already stretched thin and farmers already in crisis.

This is not efficiency. This is institutional erosion—and the farmers waiting on loan approvals, conservation contracts, and program payments will be the ones who pay the price when the phone goes unanswered and the office is gone.

If you know a farmer, call them. Check in. The mental health crisis on American farms is real, and sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer is simply the reminder that they are not alone.

A Final Word: This Is Not Love.

I have thought long and hard about how to name what is happening between the Trump administration and the farmers who voted for it, who believed in it, who hung signs for it, who wore the hats and held the line through the first term and came back for more. And the only honest word I can find is this: it is an abusive relationship. I don’t say that lightly or to hurt anyone. I say it because I’ve watched the pattern too many times to call it anything else.

The promises of protection. The language of loyalty, ‘we have your back,’ ‘we’ll fight for you,’ ‘you are the backbone of this nation.’ And then the tariffs that slam your markets shut. The bailout check that arrives just large enough to keep you from leaving, but never large enough to make you whole. The programs cancelled without warning mid-implementation. The staff who answered your calls, gone. The offices that processed your loans, closing. The policies dressed up in the language of patriotism while the economic reality of your farm deteriorates season by season.

This is the cycle: idealize, destabilize, apologize with a check, repeat. And it works, because farmers are, by nature and by necessity, people of extraordinary resilience and extraordinary loyalty. They don’t quit. They don’t walk away from the land their grandparents cleared. That endurance is beautiful. And it is being exploited.

So here is what I believe, with everything I have: the way out of this is not through Washington alone. It is through us. It is through every person who eats, which is every person, deciding that the food system we have is not the food system we have to keep. It means buying directly from farmers when we can. It means demanding that our elected representatives, on both sides, treat agricultural policy as the national security issue it is, not as a bargaining chip or a bailout opportunity.

It means supporting the organizations on the ground, Farm Aid, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Organic Farmers Association, and hundreds of others, who are doing the patient, unglamorous work of keeping farms alive and farmers supported while the politics sort themselves out. It means refusing to accept that hunger is unmeasurable, that farmers are expendable, or that the family farm is simply an inevitable casualty of a modern economy. None of that is true. None of it has to be.

The farmers of this country have fed us through wars, droughts, depressions, and pandemics. They have asked for very little in return, just fair markets, reliable support, and the basic dignity of being able to pass something on to the next generation. That is not too much to ask. And if we show up for them the way they have always shown up for us, we can build a food system that is not just surviving, but genuinely, durably, beautifully alive.

IF YOU OR A FARMER YOU KNOW IS IN CRISIS

Farm Aid Crisis Hotline: 1-800-FARM-AID (1-800-327-6243) · National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988 · Rural Response Hotline: 1-800-464-0258You are not alone. Your life is worth more than this season’s harvest.

Written in memory of Scott McAllister and others who lost their lives serving our country on the farm.

Sources: USDA Economic Research Service · American Farm Bureau Federation · CDC National Vital Statistics · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · Farm Aid · Cornell University · Investigate Midwest · Oklahoma Farm Report · Kansas Reflector · Foreign Policy · Newsweek · Civil Eats · Organic Farmers Association · National Organic Coalition · Beyond Pesticides · Pasa Sustainable Agriculture · National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition · May 2026