2 weeks Ago
The Trump Administration may grant U.S. agriculture special exemptions from parts of its ever-changing tariff regime but it can't exempt it from everyday economic reality.
That mainstay of farming–with or without ever-changing White House trade policies–will keep the 2025 American ag economy on its heels, say the farm income specialists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Tariffs will only make USDA's bleak income forecast worse. According to USDA, 2025's net farm income will be a slim $137.7 billion, slightly skinnier than last year's $139.
1 billion. Both, however, are miles from 2022's record of $182 billion. Recall, however, that Congress poured billions into the ag economy last December.
Those "Supplemental and ad hoc disaster assistance payments," USDA notes, "are forecast at $35.7 billion..
. (for) losses due to natural disasters in 2023 and 2024." People are also reading.
.. When other, already-on-the-books USDA payments–like EQIP and CRP–are added in, farmers and ranchers can expect 2025 "Federal Government direct farm program payments" to be a whopping $42.
4 billion. Only one year tops that amount, 2020's record-setting $45.6 billion, which included the first Trump Administration's $27 billion "Market Facilitation Program" introduced to soften the effects of its 2018 tariffs that clipped ag exports to China.
This year's federal "assistance" explains USDA, will go straight to farmers 2025's bottom line and raise the market-generated total from $137.7 billion to a near-record $180.1 billion.
None of that, however, includes one penny of the money both the White House and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promised farmers and ranchers recently when explaining the Administration's ever-evolving tariff policies. Billions in potential ag exports and billions in future farm program payments are at stake. America's top five ag buyers, Mexico, Canada, China, the European Union (EU), and Japan, accounted for 61 percent of 2024's total $191 billion in U.
S. ag exports. Any threat to one of them is a threat to every American farmer and rancher.
China, again the target of White House wrath, imported $24.7 billion of U.S.
ag goods in 2024. This vital U.S.
ag market now faces a 104 percent tariff. That means everyone from Beijing to Brooklyn will lose: China will lose its best source of high quality grain, meat, and farm technology, American farmers and ranchers will lose a hard-won, valued customer, and U.S.
taxpayers can expect to foot the bill for both. Ironically, the biggest winners will still be American–South American, mostly Brazil and Argentina. There will be two other losers.
First, giving away any ag export market in a tariff war means the American ag trade deficit will grow. After almost 60 years of ag trade surpluses, the U.S.
turned an ag trade deficit in 2019, the year after the first Trump Administration imposed tariffs on China. Since then, the annual deficit has grown; it hit $37 billion in 2024 and is forecast at $49 billion in 2025. But that was before White House tariff bulls started pawing for a fight.
Today's tariff war will increase–not cut as the Trump White House claims–the ag trade deficit. American taxpayers are losers, too, because, if the Administration keeps its word and protects American farmers from tariff losses, "ad hoc disaster assistance payments" could easily double from the forecasted $42.4 billion.
Think not? If anticipated "trade war" payments simply matched the "market facilitation payments" the first Trump USDA paid farmers in 2018 and 2019, they'd receive another $27 billion. Today's far bigger tariff war suggests far bigger payments–$40 billion? $60 billion? More? – to stem the bleeding caused by this self-inflicted trade war. Whatever the cost, it can't possibly cover what will be lost.
Download the new Journal Star News Mobile App Top Journal Star photos for April 2025 Cows graze in the fields below as Sandhill Cranes take flight at sunrise along the Platte River on Sunday, April 6, 2025, in Kearney. The Cranes eat corn from the grain fields and then sleep on the sandbars. The largest congregation of sandhill cranes occurs from February to early April along the Platte River in Nebraska.
Gretna East senior Sonora DeFini scores against Lincoln Southwest with a header during a high school soccer game on Monday, April 7, 2025, at Beechner Athletic Complex. Halsey, a Great Horned Owl, looks through a kaleidoscope of mirrors on display on Saturday, April 5, 2025, at Indian Center Inc in Lincoln. Lincoln Southwest's Sole Jones (center) competes against other athletes in heat one of the girls 400m during a track and field invitational at Union Bank Stadium on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Lincoln.
A bee covered in pollen buzzes from flower to flower on Sunday, April 6, 2025, at the Sunken Gardens in Lincoln. Jarrek Renshaw, a lead mechanic, works on an engine in a testing area at Duncan Aviation on Wednesday. Duncan is expanding its engine overhaul facility, which will allow it to test engines for Canadian aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.
University of Kansas students Remi Ward (left) and Jess Judd test out their concrete canoe Friday at Holmes Lake. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Engineering hosted a competition in which college students from across the region used their own concrete mixes to design and build canoes -- some more than 20 feet long and weighing more than 300 pounds. The canoes were tested for buoyancy and raced at Holmes Lakes.
The event was part of the American Society of Civil Engineers' Mid-America Student Symposium hosted by UNL from Thursday through Saturday. Rutgers’ Yomar Carreras (left) slides into home as Nebraska’s Will Jesske tags him out on Sunday at Haymarket Park. An early voter drops off her ballot at a drop box at the Lancaster County Election Commission Office, 601 N.
46th St., on Friday in Lincoln. The primary election is Tuesday.
Sandhill Cranes excitedly dance with one another as they begin to stir along the sandbars on the Platte River the morning of Sunday, April 6, 2025, in Kearney. Hundreds of thousands of Sandhill Cranes have been converging on the Platte Basin for their annual migration to their northern breeding grounds. Every spring, as sandhill cranes are migrating to their breeding grounds, cranes without partners will start pairing up.
During this time, the cranes perform dancing displays. Although the dancing is most common in the breeding season, the cranes can dance all year long. Sometimes the dance involves wing-flapping, bowing, and jumping.
Nebraska defensive line coach Terry Bradden talks to players during a team practice on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at Hawks Championship Center. Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center, argues at the Nebraska Supreme Court in a case over the city's ban on guns in public places on Thursday, April 3, 2025, at the Capitol. Gov.
Jim Pillen (right) greets World War II veterans Clare Sward (from left) and Jay Cawley on Tuesday in Lincoln. Lincoln Pius X's Tatum Heimes (from left) and Ana Patera look on as Gretna East's Lily Frederick (far right) celebrates a goal with teammate Madi Shelburne during a high school soccer game on Monday, March 31, 2025, in Lincoln. The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.
S. and Canada. Past columns, recommended reading, and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile.
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