With hay as my primary crop, I am not in line to benefit from the $12 billion farmer bailout that’s been making the rounds in the media. Hay producers simply aren’t on the list. There’s no check coming to me, and I don’t expect one.
But I do buy groceries like everyone else. I eat the food other farmers produce, and I care deeply about whether this country can still feed itself without stumbling into preventable crises. That’s why I paid attention when a viral post claimed the $12 billion in tariff-relief payments would cost the average American household $1,000. The number was presented so confidently that people stopped bothering with arithmetic.
I’ve spent enough years in agriculture — and enough evenings in a quiet shop running numbers because the banker needs something by morning — that I can’t help myself. You take $12 billion and divide it by roughly 120 million U.S. households, and you get about $100 per household, or $142 depending on which denominator you choose. It isn’t $1,000. It isn’t even close.
But the bad math wasn’t what bothered me. What struck me instead was the rising chorus insisting that farmers “deserved” to lose money because “they voted for Trump.” As if a single checkmark in 2024 should determine whether someone earns or loses their livelihood. As if stripping income from farmers doesn’t ripple outward to the very people making the accusation.
There is a strange comfort some take in punishing a group they imagine as politically monolithic, but farmers are not a tribe marching in lockstep. They are individuals navigating one of the most unpredictable business environments in America. They made their decisions in 2024 under pressure — some out of conviction, others out of frustration, many because they believed the structural problems in agriculture would remain no matter who won. And they weren’t wrong.
Before going any further, we need to dispense with a misconception that resurfaces every election cycle: the idea that “the rural vote” and “the farmer vote” are synonymous. They aren’t. It’s another thing that’s not even close.
Rural America is a vast and varied landscape, and the overwhelming majority of people who live there are not farmers. They are teachers, loggers, nurses, mill workers, shop owners, construction crews, retirees, and people holding together the patchwork economy that exists outside the interstate corridors. Farmers are a statistical sliver of that population. In some counties you could count the commercial producers on two hands.
So when pundits blame “farmers” for the political outcome in 2024, they’re really blaming entire regions — millions of people whose views range across the spectrum. Farmers simply live within that population. They do not steer it. And they certainly don’t steer national elections. But they do produce the food that keeps all those voters fed, whether anyone likes that fact or not.
The truth, which rarely fits neatly into a comment thread, is that farmers walked into the 2024 election already bruised from the previous decade. They had been carrying the weight of stagnant real prices, rising machinery costs, higher interest rates, relentless herbicide resistance, volatile global markets, and a regulatory climate that frequently treated agriculture as a problem to be solved rather than a partner in feeding a nation. Anti-GMO rhetoric had cast suspicion on tools many farmers needed to stay viable. Activists were calling for rewilding farmland on a scale that simply ignored the math of feeding more than 330 million people in America.
Meanwhile, farm consolidation accelerated, labor shortages grew, and rural infrastructure quietly buckled.
Under those conditions, 2024 wasn’t a moment of clear ideological alignment — it was a moment of exhausted calculation. For many farmers, the choice wasn’t between good and bad. It was between bad and worse, and the calculus depended entirely on which pressure they felt most immediately. That context rarely survives the leap from lived experience to online debate. Instead, we get the simplified judgment that farmers “brought this on themselves,” as though agricultural policy were a vending machine where you press the right button and out pops the desired outcome.
Tariffs, of course, have hit farmers hard. No one in agriculture disputes that. Markets that took decades to cultivate disappeared in a matter of months. Livestock producers saw feed costs shift. Grain farmers watched export demand falter. Specialty crop growers — who depend even more heavily on trade relationships — found themselves scrambling for new buyers in a global economy that doesn’t wait politely for domestic politics to settle down.
The $12 billion relief package was a tourniquet applied after the artery had already been cut by policy choices made far above the fields. It was not a reward for loyalty or a handout to lazy producers. It was an attempt to keep a sector from collapsing under pressure it had no control over.
And here’s where the economics matter more than the politics: The United States has only about 2 million farmers left, and they feed everyone else. That’s not hyperbole; that’s arithmetic. When you destabilize a group that small, the consequences do not stop at the farm gate. They move outward through trucking, processing, storage, distribution, and finally into the grocery aisle. Price shocks don’t emerge from nowhere — they emerge from any point in the chain where the system gets thin. And agriculture, for all its productivity, has been getting thinner for decades.
When people say farmers “deserve” financial pain because of how they voted, they ignore the much larger truth: You cannot punish farmers without punishing the people they feed.
It is a peculiar feature of modern America that so many people treat food as a guaranteed constant in their lives, something that appears automatically regardless of policy, economics, or weather. The average consumer sees abundance and assumes permanence.
But those of us who work on the production side know better. We know that agriculture is not a static machine; it is a living system held together by decisions made daily under pressure. When fertilizer prices jump, when a market collapses, when a drought stretches too long or a flood arrives too fast — those decisions shift. And when enough of them shift at once, the entire system feels it.
Farmers don’t have the luxury of political purity. They don’t get to cast votes for the sake of signaling virtue. They vote based on which candidate offers even the slightest hope of slowing the downward slide. Many farmers I know didn’t see 2024 as a moment of choosing a hero. They saw it as choosing the person least likely to accelerate the damage. That is hardly the triumphant narrative some imagine when they accuse farmers of voting “against their own interests.”
If anything, it reflects the fact that agriculture has become so vulnerable that farmers no longer see a candidate who represents a clear path forward. They see only varying levels of risk.
And let’s be honest about something else: farmers were struggling long before tariffs arrived. Agriculture has been absorbing blow after blow — environmental, economic, and cultural — for years. Land values rose, but net equity quietly eroded through machinery depreciation, interest burdens, and tight margins. Regulatory pressures increased. Labor grew scarce. Meanwhile, rural communities faced shrinking tax bases, school closures, and health care deserts. These are not the conditions of a sector living high on the hog. They are the conditions of a sector doing everything it can just to keep the wheels turning.
That’s why the idea that a one-time relief package is somehow an undeserved windfall misses the point entirely. It isn’t about farmers getting ahead. It’s about keeping them from being pushed entirely out of the system. And when people celebrate that possibility as righteous punishment, they reveal something troubling about how far removed they are from the realities of food production. They imagine a world where farms close but grocery stores remain unaffected. They picture an economy where the folks who grow the food can disappear without altering the availability of the food itself.
That isn’t how systems work, and it certainly isn’t how agriculture works.
Again, for the record: I receive none of that $12 billion. I still get up in the morning, climb on a tractor, and work through the usual mix of dust, diesel, broken parts, and unpredictable weather. My operation stands or falls on its own. But I am connected to the rest of agriculture whether I want to be or not, because the health of one segment influences the others.
When grain farmers get squeezed, feed prices shift. When specialty crop growers lose markets, shipping schedules change. When dairies collapse, hay markets collapse with them. Agriculture is not a set of isolated businesses — it is a braided system. Cut one strand and the tension increases on all the others.
That’s why it’s so dangerous to reduce the current situation to a political morality play. It distracts from the real question: What is the long-term cost of destabilizing the people who feed the country? And here, again, the numbers matter. The United States enjoys some of the cheapest food in the developed world, but that’s not a birthright. It’s the product of an agricultural system that has — until recently — been able to absorb shocks through efficiency, innovation, and sheer stubbornness.
But efficiency cuts both ways. It reduces waste and cost, yes, but it also reduces redundancy. A system that can feed hundreds of millions with only 2 million producers is efficient — but fragile. When things go wrong, they go wrong fast.
If someone wants to debate tariffs, I’ll gladly join them. There’s plenty to criticize. But if someone wants to argue that farmers deserve the consequences of policies they did not write, while ignoring the national consequences of their collapse, then we are no longer talking about economics. We are talking about a society that has lost sight of the people who keep it fed.
Before we keep arguing about who “deserves” what, maybe we should ask a simpler question: How much is a stable food supply worth to us?
Because the day we find out the real cost, it won’t be through a meme claiming $1,000 per household. It will be through a grocery bill — one that doesn’t go back down.
Ben Henson is a lifelong farmer and international agricultural consultant with over 30 years of experience in the U.S. and Africa. He currently splits his time between a hay and cattle farm in Oregon and a climate-smart agriculture initiative in Rwanda.
