At the heart of America’s breadbasket, farmers are facing a crisis that’s as much about economics as it is about legacy, identity, and survival. In 2025, a confluence of trade wars, rising costs, and shifting global markets has left many family farms teetering on the brink, with some wondering if they’ll be the generation to lose the land their ancestors fought so hard to keep.
For Jeffrey Daniels and Franklin Carmack, friends and farmers in rural Tennessee, the West Tennessee State Fair has always been a celebration of hard work and tradition. Their families have tilled the soil since the days of sharecropping in the 1800s, but this year, instead of showing off their best cotton and soybeans, they found themselves selling T-shirts made from their own cotton—250 shirts at $35 each. The extra income was a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $800,000 in combined losses they expect this year, a figure that underscores just how dire things have become for American agriculture.
“We’re selling our commodities at the same price that we were selling them for and that our grandparents were selling them for in the 70s,” Daniels told ABC News. “So, you know, if you think about that, what can you go buy today that costs the same as it did in the 70s?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Yet, for farmers, little has changed but the costs—which have skyrocketed.
Input costs, including seed, equipment parts, and fertilizer, have soared by more than 30% over the past five years, fueled by inflation and rising interest rates. “The morale in the farming industry, not just farmers, is the lowest I’ve ever seen. Everybody’s on edge,” Carmack admitted. The numbers bear out their pessimism: in the first half of 2025, farm bankruptcies jumped 57% compared to the same period the previous year, according to Modern Newsstand LLC via the Miami Herald.
The pain is particularly acute for soybean farmers. In May 2025, China—once the largest buyer of American soybeans, with the crop worth nearly $25 billion in exports the previous year—stopped all purchases in retaliation for President Trump’s tariffs. As a result, U.S. farmers lost their most important export market overnight. Argentina quickly stepped in to fill the gap, deepening American farmers’ woes. The loss of the Chinese market isn’t just a blip; it’s a seismic shift.
Nor are soybeans the only crop under pressure. Cotton farmers like Daniels and Carmack have watched prices dwindle and global demand shrink as clothing manufacturers turn to cheaper synthetic fabrics. The result? Many farmers have been forced to take on second and even third jobs—driving trucks, repairing boats, and hustling to make ends meet. “It’s getting down, it’s getting low,” Daniels said of his farm’s equity. “Do you just keep going, rolling the dice, hoping things will turn? I mean, it’s not looking good.”
President Trump, for his part, has promised a new bailout of up to $13 billion for American farmers, funded by tariffs. “We’re going to take some of that tariff money that we made, we’re going to give it to our farmers who are, for a little while, going to be hurt until it kicks in, the tariffs kick in to their benefit,” Trump said at the White House in September 2025. But for many, the aid feels like a stopgap. “It will help pay some bills, but that’s not fixing the problem. It’s a band aid when we need stitches,” Carmack said. The sentiment is echoed by farmers across the country, who’d rather earn their living in the fields than rely on government checks.
Meanwhile, the administration’s broader trade policies have left many feeling betrayed. In the fall of 2025, the White House announced a $40 billion bailout for Argentina, a major competitor in soybean markets. At the same time, plans to quadruple Argentine beef imports were unveiled, ostensibly to lower U.S. grocery prices. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association was quick to criticize the move: “In a misguided effort to lower the price of beef in grocery stores, President Trump said he plans to increase the volume of beef being imported from Argentina. Efforts to manipulate markets only risk damaging the livelihoods of American cattlemen and women, while doing little to impact the price consumers are paying at the grocery store,” the group wrote on its website.
For many American farmers, these policies cut deep. As Carmack put it, “Come to the farm. Come walk in my shoes. I’d show him the daily life that I do from cleaning equipment, running equipment, dispatching trucks. And then I would show him the receipts, what I’m getting from my crop. He’s a smart man. I’m not going to take that away from him. And it won’t take him five minutes to say, this isn’t going to work.”
The economic strain is taking a toll not just on wallets, but on mental health. The suicide rate among agricultural workers is three times higher than the general working population, according to the CDC’s most recent data from 2021. In Shelby County, Missouri, Jolie Foreman’s nonprofit, Shelby County Cares, has seen a troubling rise in crisis calls. “I know the numbers are going up. I know more people are affected. I know the prices of everything get higher and higher—and the stresses are added to it,” Foreman told ABC News. In 2022, the county averaged one suicide every three months. In 2025, neighboring Macon County has already seen two confirmed farm suicides.
Foreman’s organization tries to break through the stoicism that’s long defined rural communities, reaching farmers through their spouses and community gatherings. “They isolate. They bottle things up. They think they need to solve their own problems. And they’re afraid to reach out,” said Amanda Strange, a local farm wife. The ripple effects are devastating: research shows that for every suicide, 130 people are affected.
Despite the hardship, some hold out hope. Brent Foreman, who farms over 1,000 acres of soybeans and 650 acres of corn with his son, said, “I have a lot of faith in him [President Trump], and a lot of trust in him. And I think he’s trying to make us the best deal he can for the whole country, but for the American farmer, for the long term.” Nearly 80% of voters in farming-dependent counties supported Trump in the last election, but frustration is mounting. “A lot of American farmers, cattle people, probably feel let down currently now. Maybe there’s a method to the madness, you know, that’s still to be seen,” Daniels reflected.
As farm families across the heartland face mounting debts, uncertain markets, and the weight of generations past, the future of American agriculture hangs in the balance. The next year may prove pivotal—for their livelihoods, their communities, and the legacy of the family farm.
