Dec. 14, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET
There was so much blarney and puffery flying around the Cabinet Room during the Dec. 8 White House farmer/rancher gathering that it became impossible to tell fact from fiction.
For example, in explaining the $12 billion “bridge payment” the White House hopes to send U.S. farmers by Feb. 28, President Donald Trump “suggested that tariffs would fund the assistance,” noted Agri-Pulse.
Nope, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins later corrected. The $12 billion will be taxpayer money from USDA’s newly replenished Commodity Credit Corporation, she explained, not the up-and-down tariffs collected by the president’s up-and-down tariff policy.
Rollins herself had trouble with facts. According to Successful Farming, the ag boss “called the one-time bridge payments ‘the bridge to get from the last administration, and what happened under the last president and the last U.S. Department of Agriculture, to this Golden Age of farmers.'”
To ensure everyone got her multiple “last” references to the Biden administration, Rollins added lastly, “‘It was an absolute war on agriculture and our rural communities’ … that changed on Jan. 20.”
USDA farm income data, however, shows there was no “war on agriculture and our rural communities” during the Biden administration. In fact, it shows just the opposite: The Biden years, 2021 to 2024 inclusive, posted $751 billion in collective net farm income with $64 billion of it tied to “federal government direct farm program payments.”
On the other hand, the first Trump administration, 2017 through 2020 inclusive, shows collective net farm income at $338.8 billion, or just 45% of the subsequent Biden years, while federal farm program payments were a whopping $93.2 billion, or 145% greater than during the Biden years.
Since both administrations operated under very similar farm legislation, the crop insurance-centered 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills, the comparison is almost straight line. As such, there’s no distinctive policy difference for the stunningly low net farm income or steep increase in government payments during the first Trump term.
Except, of course, for the tariffs imposed by the White House in 2019.
The impact of those tariffs – especially those aimed at China – hit U.S. ag markets like a sledgehammer. Best analyses now claim those tariffs cost U.S. farmers $27 billion in ag exports in 2019 and 2020. The loss of sales to China accounted for about 95% of the shortfall.
Back then, the Trump administration papered over its crushing tariff policy with billions of taxpayer dollars. Federal farm program payments ballooned from $13.7 billion in pre-tariff 2018 to $22.4 billion in 2019 and a whopping $45.6 billion in 2020.
And we know that those increased payments were tied to the market-clipping tariffs for two reasons. First, the White House and its then ag chief, Sonny Perdue, acknowledged as much when tariff mitigation schemes were pulled out of thin air and put into play. Remember the mathematical gymnastics of the “market facilitation payments” program?
More convincingly, however, once the ag side of the Trump tariff plan ended with Biden’s 2020 election, bailout payments to farmers began to sag. Farm program spending fell from $26 billion in 2021 to $15.6 billion in 2022, $12.3 billion in 2023 and just $10.1 billion in 2024.
Meanwhile, China, the target of tariffs then and now, casually brushed aside each. Indeed, the day before the Trump/Rollins “bridge” meeting with ag leaders, China announced that its trade surplus “topped $1 trillion for the first time” this year.
Further proof that the bridge the White House wants American taxpayers to again finance needs to be one for it to get over their failed-again tariff policy.
The Farm and Food File is published weekly through the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, events and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile.com.