President Donald Trump announced a $12 billion farm aid package on Monday — a boost to farmers who have struggled to sell their crops while getting hit by rising costs after the president raised tariffs on China as part of a broader trade war.
He unveiled the plan Monday afternoon at a White House roundtable with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, lawmakers and farmers who raise cattle and grow corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, rice, wheat, and potatoes.
“$12 billion is a lot of money,” Trump said, adding that the additional aid will help provide certainty for farmers. The money is coming from tariff revenue, he said.
Rollins said in her own remarks that $11 billion is being announced on Monday, while another $1 billion is being held back for specialty crops.
Farmers have backed Trump politically, but his aggressive trade policies and shifts in tariff rates have come under increasing scrutiny because of the impact on the agricultural sector and because of broader consumer worries.
The aid is the administration’s latest effort to defend Trump’s economic stewardship and answer voter angst about rising costs — even as the president has dismissed concerns about the concept of affordability as a Democrat “hoax.”
Upwards of $11 billion is set aside for the Department of Agriculture's Farmer Bridge Assistance program, which the White House says will offer one-time payments to farmers for row crops.
Soybeans and sorghum were hit the hardest by the trade dispute with China because more than half of those crops are exported each year with most of the harvest going to China.
The aid is meant to help farmers who have suffered from trade wars with other nations, inflation, and other market disruptions. The rest of the money will be for farmers who grow crops not covered under the bridge assistance program, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity ahead of the formal announcement to detail the new plan. The money is intended to offer certainty to farmers as they sell their current harvest, as well as plan for next year's crop.
In October, after Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, the White House said Beijing had promised to buy at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans by the end of the calendar year, plus 25 million metric tons a year in each of the next three years. Soybean farmers have been hit especially hard by Trump’s trade war with China, which is the world’s largest buyer of soybeans.
China has purchased more than 2.8 million metric tons of soybeans since Trump announced the agreement at the end of October. That’s only about one quarter of what administration officials said China had promised, but Bessent has said China is on track to meet its goal by the end of February.
“These prices haven’t come in, because the Chinese actually used our soybean farmers as pawns in the trade negotiations,” Bessent said on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” explaining why a “bridge payment” to farmers was needed.
The size of the $12 billion aid package is roughly the value of total U.S. soybean exports to China in 2024 and half of the total exports of U.S. farm goods to China in 2024.
Farmers appreciate the aid package, but some of them say it’s likely only a down payment on what’s needed and government aid doesn’t solve the fundamental problems farmers are facing of soaring costs and uncertain markets for their crops. During Trump’s first term, he gave farmers more than $22 billion in aid payments in 2019 at the start of his trade war with China and nearly $46 billion in 2020, although that year also included aid related to the COVID pandemic.
But farmers want to make a profit off of selling their crops -- not rely on government aid to survive.
“That’s a start, but I think we need to be looking for some avenues to find other funding opportunities and we need to get our markets going. That’s where we want to be able to make a living from,” said Caleb Ragland, the Kentucky farmer who serves as president of the American Soybean Association.
If farmers can’t make ends meet this year, there will likely be additional consolidation in the industry with giant industrial farms only getting bigger while the number of smaller family farmers continues to shrink. The farmers most at risk are younger farmers and those who rent -- instead of own -- most of the ground they farm because they don’t have much ability to borrow against the equity in their land.
Most established farmers will be able to borrow more to survive the trade war. But older farmers who spent their whole lives building up equity may decide to retire instead of risk everything they built up unless they are trying to help the next generation of farmers get established on their land.
Iowa farmer Robb Ewoldt is in a difficult position because he only owns 160 of the 2,000 acres he farms. So he’s selling some of his equipment that’s not essential and looking into whether he can pick up some overnight trucking jobs to help raise some cash.
“It is to the point where I don’t want to saddle my kid with the kind of stress that my wife and I are under right now,” Ewoldt said.
Trump has also been under pressure to address soaring beef prices, which have hit records for a number of reasons. Demand for beef has been strong at a time when drought has cut U.S. herds and imports from Mexico are down due to a resurgence in a parasite. Trump has said he would allow for more imports of Argentine beef.
He also had asked the Department of Justice to investigate foreign-owned meat packers he accused of driving up the price of beef, although he has not provided evidence to back his claims.
On Saturday, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to look at “anti-competitive behavior” in food supply chains — including seed, fertilizer and equipment — and consider taking enforcement actions or developing new regulations.
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