Farmers may face a fourth federal bailout in 13 months — a glaring sign the system isn’t working

As Angela Huffman recently wrote on Substack, the federal government has delivered — or is preparing to deliver — four separate farm bailouts, totaling tens of billions of dollars, in just the past year. While emergency aid is urgently needed to keep farmers afloat, the frequency of these bailouts makes one thing clear: the farm economy itself is not working.

Since late 2024, Congress has approved $10 billion in emergency assistance, expanded long-term farm subsidies by more than $65 billion, authorized another $12 billion in trade and price relief, and is already discussing yet another bailout for early 2026. Farmers don’t want handouts — but repeated rescues are becoming the only way to survive in a system that no longer delivers fair prices.

The root problem is decades of farm policy shaped by corporate interests, pushing farmers to overproduce a narrow set of commodity crops — mainly corn and soybeans — for export markets, biofuels, and industrial livestock feed. This leaves producers exposed to global price swings while America imports more of the food it actually eats, running a roughly $50 billion food trade deficit.

At the same time, consolidation has tightened its grip. A handful of corporations dominate seeds, fertilizer, chemicals, grain trading, meatpacking, and processing. These companies can raise input costs while holding down what farmers are paid. When the math no longer works, bailout checks become the backstop — but much of that money flows straight to lenders and input suppliers, not into farmers’ pockets.

On the ground, farmers are cutting repairs, delaying investments, taking off-farm jobs, and still going under. Since 2017, the U.S. has lost more than 160,000 farms, and bankruptcies are climbing toward levels not seen since the 1980s farm crisis.

Huffman’s article argues that bailouts treat the symptoms, not the disease. Real change means rebalancing farm policy — supporting fruits, vegetables, and real food, rebuilding regional processing and markets, and breaking up the corporate concentration that keeps farmers trapped between rising costs and falling prices.

Without structural reform, emergency aid will keep coming — and farms will keep disappearing.

Read Huffman’s article here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-181740771