In Reply to: Albania wants to apologize to Trump posted by mh on October 02, 2025 at 09:04:34
Trump many not be able to think that far ahead, but the corporate farms are probably influential.
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“We’re in a hell of a mess here,” said Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs as he worked on his combine at the start of harvest season.
“A severe cash flow mess,” he sighed. “A working capital mess.”
Gibbs, who farms more than 500 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa hay in Shelby County, along with a 90-head cow-calf operation, described the five-alarm fire raging in the farming community from Trump’s blanket tariffs.
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Some growers have called the fallout from his chaotic trade war, and the reciprocal tariffs it provoked, a “farmageddon” that could ruin what made rural America great.
It’s that bad.
The Trump tariffs are shrinking incomes and exploding expenses for farmers, who, thanks to a president they still overwhelmingly support, fear losing their farms.
Many don’t know how much longer they can hang on.
Trump’s punitive tariffs on foreign buyers made their crops less competitive in markets around the world (and drove down prices more) while other senseless tariffs on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, and lumber just sent the cost of doing business through the roof.
The double whammy of Trump tariffs is especially painful for family farms that make up about 87 percent of all farms in Ohio.
Individual farmers struggle to break even, buy supplies, sell their crops, and build a sustainable future with long-term customers.
But the current tariff dance with Trump keeps them up nights.
Everything a farmer buys “from phosphate and potash to agricultural chemicals, herbicides, machine parts, is up by 50 percent over the last decade, while our proceeds from the sale of crops is down by 40 percent,” said fifth-generation Ohio farmer Joe Logan.
The former president of the Ohio Farmers union — a group focused on family farmers — maintained “the industrial agricultural community is chugging right along, raking in billions of dollars” while family farmers are not making any money.