March is when most people’s thoughts turn to spring and most farmers start looking forward to another productive year of growing food, feed and fiber.
Until then, though, there’s weather to endure, machinery to ready, and — especially this year — almost too much time for the government to meddle — muddle — with trade partnerships, tariffs, ethanol policy and ad hoc payments.
What should farmers do now in case the so-called “party of limited government” and the White House again choose to toss out trade deals, juggle tariff rates, invent more ad hoc farm program subsidies, not pass a Farm Bill and make even more hash of “green” ag programs?
In most years, that’s a complex equation without an easy answer. This year, however, it’s a hypothetical wrapped in haze, hyperbole and helplessness.
Take, for example, the premier “ask” by Midwest farm groups of governing Republicans: boost ethanol blends from 10% to 15%. Oil state House members from ruby red Texas and Kansas derailed that move in January.
Weeks later, the GOP-led 2026 House Farm Bill excluded E15 expansion entirely.
But ethanol has a bigger problem than protective oil patch refiners and their Republicans backers: the staggering cost of government subsidies that underwrite controversial “carbon capture” pipelines that ethanol must have to recast itself as “green” and “environmentally friendly.”
The most prominent of the pipeline hopefuls, “Summit Carbon Solutions and its partners,” explains Inside Climate News, “could be eligible for as much as $18 billion in federal tax benefits over 12 years.”
Others peg overall costs — both in dollars and greenwashing — considerably higher. One recent study suggests “the tax incentives could cost the government as much as $100 billion over a decade…”
Before our government commits to these clearly questionable CO2 pipelines, an honest cost-benefit analysis is needed to ensure taxpayers are getting anywhere close to the value operators and ethanol refiners claim.
Then there’s the problem few farmers working today have ever had to deal with — tumbling ag exports and the increasingly stubborn American ag trade deficit.
According to Department of Agriculture (USDA) data compiled for calendar year 2025, U.S. ag exports fell 3% last year, to $171.3 billion, while U.S. ag imports held nearly steady at $212 billion.
The difference, nearly $41 billion, marks the fourth in a row of U.S. ag trade deficits.
A big reason behind 2025’s decline is China, a target of the White House’s rollercoaster tariff policy. Calendar 2025 soybean sales to China dropped $9.6 billion. Compared to 2024, overall U.S. ag sales to China sagged 66%.
Just as that news was sinking in, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the White House’s pretext for its tariffs, a non-existent “national emergency,” was unconstitutional or illegal.
Any thought that the ruling might mean a comeback for ag exports was short-lived, however. After the ruling, President Donald Trump quickly imposed a blanket 10% tariff on the world, then bumped it to 15%, then reverted back to 10%.
What will the tariffs be next week or next August? No one, not even the president, knows.
But farmers know this whack-a-mole approach to trade makes the U.S one of the most unreliable trading partners in the world. Which means that if push comes to shove, cash-carrying customers will buy whatever they want elsewhere.
They already are. After President Trump reimposed his global tariffs in late February, key ag trading partners like the European Union, China and fast-rising India announced they are moving to the sidelines while the U.S. sorts its tariff mess.
Maybe it’s time for the leader of the “party of limited government” to do the same.
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Contact information is posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
