President Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to provide aid to U.S. farmers hit by his sweeping tariff policy, but that hasn’t freed the agriculture industry from worries of tight margins and volatile markets.
On Monday, Trump, alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, announced a $12 billion farm aid program, which outlined much-needed relief for farmers who sounded the alarms about increasing input costs and fewer export opportunities amid ongoing trade tensions. Farmers will begin receiving funds by the end of February, Rollins said.
“Now we’re once again in a position where a president is able to put farmers first,” Trump said at a Monday roundtable of farmers and lawmakers. “But unfortunately, I’m the only president that does that.”
While farmers and agricultural economists see the package as a way to move forward after a disappointing harvest season, they fear the precedent of cash bailouts does not provide systemic solutions to a beleaguered industry, and they don’t believe the $12 billion gesture is enough to solve agriculture’s deeper challenges.
“We’re talking $12 billion, and while it is a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still going to be a Band-Aid on a bigger wound,” Ryan Loy, assistant professor and extension economist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, told Fortune. “How can we triage this situation right now, work on that longer-term solution? That’s really, I think, the overall attitude toward it.”
