In response, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a meeting of state departments of agriculture this month that help was possibly on the way. Farmers may get it: It would hardly be the first time Trump bailed them out after wrecking their markets. The fact that it was a tough year for farmers was front of mind at this past weekend’s Farm Aid. Online, pundits and commentators have seemed confused about why farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the first place, treating it as another example of the working class voting against their interests.
President Jimmy Carter was the last farming president, which is fitting, because he was elected at the end of a steep decline in the number of American farms. The Great Depression reshaped the American landscape. It came with a crash in agricultural markets alongside the Dust Bowl—an ecological disaster that doomed many family farms. There were 6.8 million farms in the country in 1935, and fewer than a third were left by the end of the 1970s. The decline slowed after that, but fewer than two million farms remained in 2024. At the same time, the number of agriculturally dependent rural counties in the U.S. has also declined.
Those are the exceptions. But the average farm overall still had $1,439,138 in wealth. Many of those farmers rely on off-farm income—meaning the families who own them work other jobs—and the land they use for grazing cattle or growing corn is more of a side hustle. The wealth comes from the land and capital investments, and the farm operations themselves often run at a loss, but those households have had higher median incomes than the national median every year since 1988. Many family farm proprietors have already inherited land from their families or otherwise have the money to invest.
So those farmers praying for government relief are used to it arriving when they need it. They rely on it. And they knew what they were bargaining for with Trump.
When she spoke to farmers, they pointed to other benefits in electing Trump. Those included ending increased protections for farm labor under the Biden administration and rolling back environmental regulations. Earlier in the year, farmers celebrated some of the tax changes in the budget reconciliation bill, including an estate tax exemption that allows big farms to pass to future generations tax-free. Trump had also promised to mute the effects of his mass deportation scheme on agriculture.
Taber suggested it might be time for the farmers of generations past to move on and let those new to agriculture try their luck and innovate. In the meantime, the real working class in the U.S., in rural areas and elsewhere, are the service workers clocking in at retail giants, or pink-collar assistants at rural hospitals—who are squeezed by low wages, few job protections, the end of government programs like Medicaid, and an affordability crisis that rages on. But they’re not part of a celebrated brand of Americana, and they have fewer champions.
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