The Trump administration will provide $12 billion in one-time payments to farmers to offset the challenges they faced in 2025, including increased trade market volatility and rising input costs.
The Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) Program will provide $11 billion of the total assistance to row crop farmers, producing barley, canola, chickpeas, corn, cotton, cramble, flax, lentils, mustard, oats, peanuts, peas, rice, rapeseed, safflower, sesame, sorghum, soybeans, sunflower, and wheat, the USDA shared in a press release.
The FBA Program will use “a uniform formula to cover a portion of modeled losses during the 2025 crop year,” based on FSA-reported planted acres, Economic Research Service cost of production estimates, World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates yields, and economic and price modeling.
Farmers have until Dec. 19, 2025, to ensure the details of their acreage reporting are accurate, and qualifying farmers should expect their payments by Feb. 28, 2026.
The remaining $1 billion will be reserved for crops not covered under the FBA Program, including specialty crops and sugar, with details on that assistance forthcoming.
“The plan we are announcing today ensures American farmers can continue to plan for the next crop year. It is imperative we do what it takes to help our farmers, because if we cannot feed ourselves, we will no longer have a country,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a press release.
Who’s to blame for market volatility? Trump or Biden?
This year, farmers faced a one-two punch with rising input costs and shrinking market access. Most notably, U.S. soybean farmers were cut off from China for most of the year — a major soybean importer — amid the Trump administration’s trade negotiations and back-and-forth tariffs on the Asian country.
Tariffs had a direct impact on a variety of crop inputs and machinery, as ag lender Rabobank previously shared with AgTechNavigator. Last month, John Deere posted its full-year fiscal results for 2025, ending Nov. 2, with net sales and revenues declining 12%, due in part to tariffs.
However, the farmer bailout could exacerbate rising input costs, similar to how stimulus checks during the Covid pandemic led to consumer inflation, Stephen Nicholson, global sector strategist, grains and oilseed at Rabobank, noted in a previous AgTechNavigator article.
“These bailouts are a direct result of the president’s own trade war with China, which greatly downsized our largest soybean market and is now forcing taxpayers to prop up the biggest players, not the farmers who need help the most.”
Anne Schechinger, the EWG’s Midwest director and agricultural economist
The USDA did not cite the Trump admin’s trade negotiations or tariffs as the need for one-time payments, instead laying blame at the previous administration for “zero new trade deals,” the agency shared in a press release.
“Four years under the failed Biden Administration continues to leave the American farm economy reeling from record inflation, a depleted farm safety net, and delayed disaster assistance. The lack of new trade deals under the last administration turned a trade surplus under Trump into a $50 billion trade deficit, causing our farmers to lose markets and feel acute pain from lower commodity prices,” Rollins said in the press release.
Trade groups respond to bailout
Farmer trade groups were quick to respond to the bailout package, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, striking a grateful tone for the support.
“America’s farmers have been hit from every direction during this economic storm. They face the same high prices as all of America’s families, as more of their income is going to household bills and higher operating costs, including loans, equipment, and supplies. At the same time, farmers are receiving historically low prices for most major crops — they’re expected to lose $34 billion this year alone,” Zippy Duvall, American Farm Bureau Federation president, shared in a statement.
He added, “We appreciate that Congress addressed many economic challenges in legislation earlier this year, but many farm program improvements will not kick in until next year. The assistance announced today will make an immediate impact by providing a lifeline for farmers who work to ensure a healthy, safe, and abundant food supply.”
However, not everyone was thrilled with the government’s bailout programme, including non-profit the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which called out the assistance for favouring larger farms.
“Farm policies have long supported the largest and wealthiest farms. The Trump administration had an important opportunity to change that but instead chose to send even more money to large and corporate farms and further disadvantage small farms, which are struggling the most under the president’s trade policies,” said Anne Schechinger, the EWG’s Midwest director and agricultural economist, in a press release.
She added, “These bailouts are a direct result of the president’s own trade war with China, which greatly downsized our largest soybean market and is now forcing taxpayers to prop up the biggest players, not the farmers who need help the most.”
