Brookland, Arkansas, became the unlikely epicentre of America’s rural despair on September 2, 2025. What was intended to be a modest farmer meeting with political representatives turned into an overflow gathering of more than 400 growers, spilling outside the Woods Chapel Baptist Church. These were not protestors imported from afar, but men and women in mud-caked boots who had abandoned harvest fields mid-season, something virtually unthinkable in farm country. Their message was unmistakable: the American farmer is on the brink of collapse and nobody in power seems to care.
Notably, U.S. farm debt is projected to hit $561.8 billion by the close of 2025, marking a 3.7 percent jump from last year. Chapter 12 bankruptcies, designed specifically for family farmers, have already nearly doubled in the first quarter alone. In Arkansas, where agriculture generates $16 billion annually, many farmers say they are running out of hope.
The stories told inside that chapel echoed like a collective obituary for family farming. Adam Chappell, a fourth-generation farmer cultivating soybeans, rice, and corn on 2,400 acres in east Arkansas, summed it up with weary bluntness: “This is the worst agriculture economy of my lifetime.”
And yet, in Washington, the official response has been muted. Donald Trump, who built much of his political brand on the promise of protecting “forgotten Americans,” has so far offered farmers little more than subsidies, bailouts, and rhetoric. For many growers staring at bankruptcy, those gestures are not solutions, they are stall tactics, bandages on a haemorrhage.
Trump’s silence, farmers anguish
Behind closed doors, lawmakers admit that agricultural monopolies dominate seed, fertiliser, and chemical markets with near-total control. But in public, Trump and his allies rarely name or challenge these corporate behemoths. Instead, they cling to the easy politics of farm aid, packages that funnel through banks and suppliers before trickling down to the growers, if they trickle at all.
Chappell cut through the charade with raw frustration: “Wake the hell up. Where do you think that money is gonna go? It won’t go to farmers. It’ll go into suppliers pockets, the monopolies.”
“Seed, chemicals, fertiliser, it’s all in the hands of just a few companies, and they’re the only game in town,” said Chappell. “You want to fix farming? Start a federal investigation into those corporations. How can they post booming quarterly earnings and pay out fat dividends while farmers can’t pinch a penny to survive?”
Chappell explained how the cycle works with brutal predictability. “If corn prices suddenly jump this month, nitrogen prices will magically rise next year. If soybeans hit $15 tomorrow, a bag of seed will shoot up to $90. Potash? You can bet it’ll hit $1,000. That’s the monopoly problem, plain and simple.”
This dynamic, farmers argue, is no accident. Corporations lobby aggressively for the very bailouts that claim to “save” farmers, knowing full well the money eventually cycles back into their own balance sheets. Politicians, including Trump, know it too, but confrontation with Big Ag would mean biting the hand that funds campaigns and writes policy drafts.
Human rights abroad, blind eye at home
The irony is bitter. Had such economic suffocation been unfolding in other continents, say Africa or Asia, America would almost certainly have condemned it. Washington would label it a “human rights violation,” issue damning reports, impose sanctions, and demand reform. Yet when the same dynamics crush family farmers in Arkansas, Iowa, or Kansas, the administration calls it “market correction.”
Kenneth Graves, a veteran grower and chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, described the current moment as worse than the farm crisis of the 1980s: “We are going over a cliff. I have never seen this kinda look in farmers’ eyes. It’s fear. And it’s based in undeniable facts.”
Banks forecast that up to 40 percent of farms in certain regions could fail in the coming years. If this were happening in another country, Washington would decry it as destabilisation. Yet within U.S. borders, Trump appears unwilling to act beyond platitudes and bailout announcements.
Double standards and dangerous implications
The contradiction is glaring. The U.S. lectures the world on free markets, accountability, and human dignity, but within its own borders, it tolerates monopolistic control that dictates seed and fertiliser prices, forcing families off their land.
Trump’s actions or more accurately, his inactions, reveal a truth farmers have whispered for years: Big Ag has captured Washington.
Bailey Buffalo, president of the Farm Protection Alliance, minced no words: “Farmers are literally losing money per acre while Big Agriculture is making hundreds of millions. Any fair-minded person knows the situation is way out of balance.”
A 2024 report, Cultivating Control, reveals a sharp rise in agribusiness lobbying over the past five years. Between 2019 and 2023, annual expenditures jumped 22 percent, climbing from $145 million to $177 million. Year after year, agribusiness now outpaces even the oil and gas industry and the defence sector in federal lobbying spending.
This is no longer about economics alone. Food security, long considered the bedrock of national sovereignty, now rests on the survival of farmers who cannot pass costs downstream. If they collapse, America risks dependence on foreign food systems, a vulnerability Trump has warned about in energy, steel, and technology, yet conveniently ignores in agriculture.
What about accountability?
The uncomfortable questions mount. Why no antitrust investigations into seed and fertiliser cartels? Why no moratorium on mergers and acquisitions in the ag sector, even as consolidation accelerates? Why no courage to confront corporate power that openly distorts markets?
America has demanded accountability from foreign governments for less. But when its own citizens cry out, the political establishment, Trump included, looks the other way.
The wolf is already inside the house
As Adam Chappell observed, the “wolf” is no longer scratching at the farmhouse door. It has already entered, and it is devouring the future of American farming one acre at a time.
If Washington, and Trump in particular, continue to treat the crisis as a political inconvenience rather than a national emergency, the United States risks watching its vaunted agricultural backbone collapse. Not from foreign enemies. Not from a climate disaster. But from its own leaders’ willful neglect.
The question now is unavoidable: Will Trump finally confront the monopolies strangling America’s farmers, or will history record his silence as complicity?
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