No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Republican members of Congress from farm states are working to deliver the relief farmers want. But farmers do not deserve special treatment and should not get it.

Tariffs will indeed hurt farmers badly. Farm costs will rise. Farm incomes will drop. Under Trump’s tariffs, farmers will pay more for fertilizer. They will pay more for farm equipment. They will pay more for the fuel to ship their products to market. When foreign countries retaliate, raising their own tariff barriers, American farmers will lose export markets. Their domestic sales will come under pressure too, because tariffs will shrink Americans’ disposable incomes: Consumers will have to cut back everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Farmers will share this tariff predicament of higher costs and lower incomes with almost all Americans—except the very wealthiest, who are less exposed to tariffs because they consume less of their incomes and can offset the pain of tariffs with other benefits from Trump, beginning with a dramatic reduction in tax enforcement.

Farmers are different from other Americans, however, in three ways.

First, farmers voted for Trump by huge margins. In America’s 444 most farm-dependent counties, Trump won an average of 77.7 percent of the vote—nearly two points more than Trump scored in those same counties in 2020.

Second, farmers have already pocketed windfall profits from Trump’s previous round of tariffs.

When Trump started a trade war with China in 2018, China switched its soybean purchasing from the United States to Brazil. By 2023, Brazil was exporting twice as much as the United States. Trump compensated farmers with lavish cash payouts. The leading study of these effects suggests that soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices. The richest farmers collected the greatest share of the windfall. The largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $85 an acre in payouts, according to a 2019 study by the economists Eric Belasco and Vincent Smith for the American Enterprise Institute. The median-size farm received only $56 an acre. Altogether, farmers have been amply compensated in advance for the harm about to be done to them by the man most farming communities voted for.

Third, farmers can better afford to pay the price of Trump’s tariffs than many other tariff victims.

Farmers can already obtain federal insurance against depressed prices for their products. Most farmers report low incomes from farming, but they have a high net worth. The median American farm shows net assets of about $1.5 million. Commercial-farm households show median net assets of $3.6 million. The appearance of low incomes is in any case misleading. Again, according to Smith, families that own farms earn only 20 percent of their income from farming. Even the richest farmers, those with farm assets above $6 million, still earn about half their income from other sources, including a spouse’s employment in a local business or through a rural government job such as a county extension agent. On average, farm families earn higher total incomes than nonfarm families, and their debt-to-equity ratio is typically low.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Trump is unleashing a chaos economy]

None of this is to deny that farmers will suffer from the tariffs. They will. A lot. But so will city people. As will people in industries that use steel or aluminum or copper as components. As will people in service industries and export industries, people who rely on the trade treaties trashed by Trump to protect their copyrights and patents. And anybody with money invested in stocks. And anybody who drives a car or truck.

During the 2024 election campaign, Americans were told, in effect, that no sacrifice was too great to revive the domestic U.S. toaster-manufacturing industry. If that claim is true, then farmers should be proud to pay more and receive less, making the same sacrifice as any other American.

But if a farm family voted for Trump, believing that his policies were good, it seems strange that they would then demand that they, and only they, should be spared the full consequences of those policies. Tariffs are the dish that rural America ordered for everyone. Now the dish has arrived at the table. For some reason, they do not want to partake themselves or pay their share of the bill.

That’s not how it should work. What you serve to others you should eat yourself. And if rural America cannot choke down its portion, why must other Americans stomach theirs?