U.S. growers faced a year of tariffs, trade challenges, and rising crop input prices in 2025, with the prospect of a farmer bailout once again being raised. However, many in the agriculture community are leery of what a government bailout might mean down the road.
This year, U.S. soybean farmers were cut off from the Chinese market for most of the year, amid the Trump administration’s trade negotiations with the country. Trade tensions between the two world powers appeared to have cooled slightly, with China accepting its first shipment of soybeans from the U.S. this year, as Reuters reported.
Despite recent trade developments, many growers are not thrilled with the prospect of another bailout to support them through the volatility, Owen Wagner, VP and senior analyst of grains and oilseeds at Rabobank, shared in a briefing about Rabobank’s 2025 harvest report.
A government bailout could have an inflationary impact on fertilisers, as a large amount of money chases a finite number of resources, he elaborated.
“It is interesting to see some of the cracks that are emerging within the agricultural community. You have more and more farmers that I think are expressing distaste, displeasure, [and] dissatisfaction with this unending cycle of bailouts and direct government payments, coupled perhaps with ever-increasing mandates on the biofuel front. And what we are seeing is more farmers arguing, ‘Hey, when this happens, what I end up seeing is that my rent increases or the cost that I’m paying for some of these inputs increases,” he elaborated.
Is the U.S. agricultural sector in a recession?
The topic of bailouts comes as the U.S. ag industry is experiencing a downturn, as overproduction drags down prices despite strong demand for U.S. agricultural goods, Rabobank representatives shared.
The agricultural economy downturn in the 1980s resulted in farmers seeing “massive declines in land valuations and agricultural rents,” Wagner noted. This could come as land values are at record highs, with the average acre of farmland worth $4,350 in 2025, a 4.3% increase from the previous year, according to the USDA’s The Land Values 2025 Summary Report
The U.S. agriculture sector is facing tougher competition on a global stage and imports more food than it exports, Rabobank representatives shared. The U.S. maintained a positive trade balance until 2019, but then started importing more than it was exporting, the USDA reported. The U.S. faced a $21 billion trade deficit in 2023,
Is the answer more specialty crop production?
Crop production in the U.S. is largely weighted to row crops, like corn and soybeans, which are cheaper than specialty crops, like fruit, tree nuts, etc. Only 10% of farm operations focused on specialty crops, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture.
However, crop insurance supports row crops more than specialty crops. Specialty crops received $20 billion in support from insurance but account for roughly 40% of crop value nationwide, while row crops receive about $130 billion a year, Eric Gibson, farm input and crop production sustainability analyst for Rabobank, noted.
“The United States has also transitioned to a net importer of agricultural products. And so, there are obviously a lot of things production decisions that could perhaps be pursued differently here in the United States to flip that script and maybe offer these guys an exit ramp to some of these lower return commodity crops, like corn and beans,” Wagner elaborated.
