National Security Eats American Farmers Alive
Pity the American farmer.
A new report has US farm bankruptcies increasing from 216 in 2024 to 315 in 2025. The Midwest alone—the breadbasket of American agriculture—saw a 70% rise in bankruptcies.
We must understand this plight as a policy choice. The farm sector of the economy is a victim of the imperial presidency and the national security state. The permanent war economy crowds out the agricultural economy.
Farmers are not facing a decline in demand for foodstuffs. They are facing rising costs of inputs to production (fuel, fertilizer, labor, transportation, and insurance) combined with greater exposure to natural hazards due to the climate crisis. American militarism is at the heart of their crisis in multiple ways.
First, Trump’s tariff regime was a pathology of the imperial presidency. Only a super-empowered executive branch could claim “national security” as a blanket justification to impose tariffs on the world. This imposed foreign retaliatory tariffs on America’s agricultural exporters, but it also raises the costs of imported materials for farming like fertilizer.
And Trump’s national security vision has been squeezing the farmer in other ways. The supposed immigration emergency at the heart of MAGA’s ethnonationalist global vision did not just entail the deployment of a secret police and the military to American cities. It cashed out as visa restrictions on farm workers, which affected labor supply.
There’s more. The Trump administration also paired reduced farm subsidies with corporate favoritism toward ideologically reactionary regimes in Latin America at the expense of American producers. The most egregious example is crypto-libertarian Javier Milei’s regime in Argentina, which received a $40 billion aid plan from the US in 2025 and signed an agreement to increase beef exports to the US by 400% just two months ago.
And because 80% of the discretionary budget now consists of national security spending ($1.5 trillion!), guns literally crowds out room for butter. In defending Iran-War spending, the corresponding $1.5 trillion military budget, and the dramatic reduction to welfare and healthcare spending he’s proposing, Trump said:
It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things…We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.
He didn’t mention agriculture but he’s extending that same tradeoff reasoning in cutting farm subsidies. Trump did announce $12 billion in aid to US farmers hurt by tariffs in 2025, but he hasn’t renewed that call; the amount was not proportional to costs; and aid does not compensate for lost markets at any rate.
Finally, the Iran war—an illegal, dehumanizing, war of choice that would not be happening if the US were not a declining empire still pursuing global primacy—is creating a food and fuel crisis. The costs of both oil and fertilizer are increasing as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz combined with damage to oil refining and transportation infrastructure. Farm foreclosures in 2027 will unquestionably be higher than they were last year.
To be clear, US agriculture was struggling before Trump. 216 farm bankruptcies in Biden’s final year in office is a lot. The inflation resulting from the Ukraine war similarly hit the American farmer hard. And dollar primacy—which is valued primarily by the national security state for the sanctioning power it provides and the financing of US military buildups it facilitates—keeps the US dollar strong relative to foreign currencies, which has always depressed the value of US agricultural exports.
But like many problems, Trump is not the origin of them; he is the accelerant of them. Unless you want to live in a fascist state, you cannot have a sprawling permanent war economy and a resilient agricultural sector. The former carries too many opportunity costs that might have benefited the latter.
At least the strain on farmers is going to be great for private equity. Bankruptcies mean distressed assets, and distressed assets get swallowed whole by vulture capitalists who strip, consolidate, and extract from the carcass of collapsed businesses. Nobody else matters. The end.
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