Farmers are feeling a little bit better about how things are going for their sector of the economy under President Donald Trump, after tariff fears spooked them.
That is one reasonable way to read the last several months’ results of the Ag Economy Barometer, a nationwide joint survey by Purdue University and the CME Group that measures the mood of farmers. It fell 12 points in March to 140 before rebounding to 158 in May.
For context, this latest barometer ranking was the highest measure since May 2021, early in former President Joe Biden’s single term, before runaway inflation and many regulatory initiatives really began.
“Key reasons behind the sentiment improvement were a much more optimistic view of U.S. agricultural export prospects, combined with a less negative view of tariffs’ impact on 2025 farm income than respondents provided in either March or April,” according to a news release from the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture.
Trump on the farm
In his runs for the White House, Trump has done better with farmers than might have been expected. His brand has been associated with urban things that are very far from farming, including real estate development, casinos, and reality TV.
And yet Trump seemed to like farmers. When he finished a close second in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Trump thanked Iowans, saying it was a good experience and that he might buy a farm there.
Throughout both of Trump’s nonconsecutive terms, many of the initiatives that he has pursued have created problems for farmers. Unlike with most other sectors, he has acknowledged those problems, promised to correct them, and sometimes done so.
Farmers’ produce has proven sometimes literally low-hanging fruit for foreign countries to target as part of the ongoing dispute over tariffs. And a significant part of the labor force of many farms is migrant labor from Mexico and farther south, which is threatened by Trump’s deportation efforts.
At the same time, the Trump administration has promised farmers reforms related to water usage and environmental red tape that many farmers believe are sorely needed.
The results thus far have been mixed. Dillon Honcoop, head of communications for the advocacy group Save Family Farming, told the Washington Examiner that the farm regulatory burden “only worsened under the Biden administration” and that many of the things its successor has promised sound great.
“Words aren’t enough,” Honcoop said. “We’ve got to see action on some of these things.” And farmers would like that to move “as quickly as possible.”
The farm economy
Total U.S. farm revenues from the sale of “livestock and products” are projected to come to $275 billion this year, up from an estimated $271 billion last year, according to data analytics firm Statista.
Set against other U.S. economic sectors, farming does not come close to cracking the top 10. The first nine sectors on the list all have projected revenues for 2025 of over $1 trillion, according to an IBIS World report. Even the final sector on the list, life insurance and annuities, is only a rounding error shy, at $999.4 billion.
A long trend line from 2001 to the present shows American farm revenues up, from $106 billion to $275 billion if everything banks right for farmers this year, or roughly 160% growth over 25 years.
Yet costs are also up sharply, especially during the Biden administration. Those costs are cutting into profits. Net farm income fell from $185 billion in 2022 to $155 billion in 2023 to $116 billion in 2024, per Statista.
That may explain why farmers were so down last fall. At the time, the Ag Economy Barometer survey found “the weakest barometer and future expectations readings since March 2016, when the farm economy was in the throes of an economic downturn.”
The worker problem
For things to turn around for farmers under Trump in his second, nonconsecutive term, a lot of things will have to go right, including a reversal of some of his policies.
Because of ICE crackdowns, many farms are having trouble getting enough workers to bring the crops in. Reports from several states have shown some crops rotting in the fields.
Such reports can be overblown. For economic reasons, there is never a 100% harvest of all U.S. crops. Still, Honcoop said many farmers he talks to are “not thrilled about how the administration has gone about the immigration crackdown.”
“Criminality” is one thing, he said, but “the signals have been murky at best” for otherwise law-abiding farm workers. And even workers who have the right documents “are still worried” by what they’re hearing, making it more difficult for farms to hire them on.
Trump has tried to address this problem, admitting on Truth Social on June 12 that his administration’s “very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away” from farms and hotels, and that those jobs turn out to be “almost impossible to replace.”
The president promised unspecified changes at the time. In late June, he said the administration was trying to create some kind of temporary pass to allow those workers through. It’s unlikely such a program could be implemented in time to help with harvests in many states.
Stability now?
Farming entails a lot of unknowns and risks. Bad weather can wipe out a crop or cut yields so low that profits disappear. Prices for meat, dairy, fruit, and vegetables fluctuate constantly. The costs of planting, feeding, and harvesting don’t tend to dip.
“It’s like a table game in Vegas, where you’re betting your whole life but you only get to roll the dice once a year and hope for the best,” Honcoop said. They are thus “looking for any certainty they can possibly hang their hat on.”
Trump has tried to reassure farmers that things will come out right. During his address to a joint session of Congress, he addressed them directly, predicting “a little bit of an adjustment period” to his tariff initiatives. He asked them “to bear with me again” and predicted that the result would be “a field day.”
THE POPE, THE PRESIDENT, AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
That “little bit” turned out to be an understatement, with over $5 trillion of value temporarily wiped out of the New York Stock Exchange and much more than that wiped out of stock exchanges the world over. But as Trump has pulled back and the courts have pulled him back further, stocks have rebounded.
Honcoop hopes to see something similar happen in the farming sector, with Trump’s immigration crackdowns pulled back and federal regulators reined in. Otherwise, he sees this year as possibly “the last block in the stack of Jenga blocks” for many smaller farms.
Jeremy Lott is the author of Growlilocks and the Three Humans.