President Donald J. Trump loves to point out that farmers “love” him. The November 2024 election results prove it’s no boast.
In fact, while the then-former president beat Vice President Kamala Harris by a slim 1.5% nationally, he crushed her by 40 points, 69% to 29%, and in “farming-dependent counties,” Trump walloped Harris by a 78-to-22 margin.
But as big as those lovely totals were in 2024, the President didn’t return much affection to rural voters in 2025. Farm inputs, health care and food costs continued to rise; yo-yo tariff policies sliced ag exports; and cuts to several federal farm and rural programs clipped rural communities.
For example, the administration’s shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development, America’s biggest overseas food aid program, ended government purchases of “about $2 billion worth of food from American farmers annually” for the Food for Peace program.
Losing a $2 billion-a-year customer in your backyard is bad, but an internal USAID memo estimated the program’s shutdown also meant an additional 1 million children worldwide would suffer from malnutrition while another 160,000 would die from malaria and 200,000 would become paralyzed by polio.
Domestically, USAID’s shutdown will be felt by farmers for decades. USAID funded 17 ag innovation labs on 13 university campuses, 12 at Land Grants; 83% of that funding, however, was cut by DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency.
“’By killing these programs,’” one ag researcher told the New Yorker magazine, “’…(y)ou’re setting farmers up to not have the tools they need to survive in a changing world.”
Then there’s the cuts to other vital U.S. Department of Agriculture programs like the “one that funds the purchase of local farm-fresh foods for school cafeterias and another that funds much of the product available in food banks.” Together they amount “to more than $1 billion in purchasing.”
USDA also cut the $3 billion Climate Smart Commodities Program that funded “projects… to improve soil health, sequester carbon, reduce methane emissions, and encourage other climate-friendly farming practices.”
The reason, explained Secretary Brooke Rollins, “was (the program) was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs” — non-governmental organizations — “not American farmers.”
That’s nonsense. The Climate Smart program — like the local spending for USAID and federal purchases of local food for schools and food banks — have a direct economic impact on farm markets and rural communities. Those billions will be irreplaceable in farm country.
These losses will be amplified in 2026 and 2027 when deep cuts contained in the so-called “big beautiful bill” hit both SNAP, the nation’s key nutrition assistance program used by one on seven rural Americans, and Medicaid, the health care program 24% of rural Americans depend on.
Those cuts — estimated at $186 billion for SNAP and $100 billion for Medicaid — not only mean less food and medical care for hungry and sick Americans, they also remove any lasting, beneficial impact both programs have on local economies.
For example, every $1 spent on SNAP generates, on average, $1.65 in the local economy. As such, if coming SNAP cuts reduce rural benefits by $28 billion (15% of total cuts), then rural communities nationwide can expect local economic activity to drop — not by $28 billion but — by $46 billion, a crushing loss that’s impossible to replace.
Now add in coming Medicaid cuts, their lost economic impact, a shaky farm economy, stagnant commodity prices, and today’s still inexplicable tariff policies and farmers and their “farm-dependent counties” will need a lot of love in 2026 and beyond.
Right now, however, it’s not coming from the White House.
(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.com. © 2026 ag comm)
