2025 was one of the worst years for farmers in years with bankruptcies skyrocketing by 46% from 2024 levels.
Prices are down, costs kept climbing. Some of that traces back to trade disruptions with China, though rising input costs are just as much to blame. Things like fertilizer, fuel, machinery, costs more than half again what it did in 2011. Meanwhile the price farmers are receiving when they sell their has only increased by 21% in that same stretch. Do that math for yourself.
Farmers needed help fast, so the Trump administration announced $12 billion in bridge payments to farmers to help them be able to plant their crops this year. It’s a lifeline for thousands of small family farms. Nobody’s arguing otherwise and the Trump Administration did the correct thing by cutting the checks.
But here’s the problem: Bailouts like this don’t fix anything for next year. They just cover this year’s losses. Whatever caused the drop, weather, higher fuel and fertilizer costs, oversupply, a trade war with China, doesn’t really matter. The fix is always the same: another check, funded by taxpayers.
But there’s a bill sitting in Congress that could make the whole cycle unnecessary going forward. It’s called the Grown in America Act.
It doesn’t ask for more checks to be cut, but creates a new incentive structure that boosts America’s family farms by pointing our tax code in a different direction.
Here is how it works: American companies get a tax credit if they buy their ingredients from American farmers. The credit kicks in once half of what they buy is American-grown, and the credit increases from there as they buy even American grown products. Buy foreign instead, and the company gets nothing.
There’s no government check involved at all, no emergency, just a standing reason for companies to keep buying American, built straight into the tax code, whether there’s a crisis that month or not.
A tax credit costs the government money too. There’s no getting around that. But it’s a cost built into the budget ahead of time, not an emergency expense the government has to scramble to cover.
Yet even more importantly we are fixing a broken system that jumps from one emergency bailout to the next to creating a customer for American family farms who keeps showing up.
Congress should pass it. Trump’s already bailed farmers out once since December 2025. He shouldn’t have to do it again just because Congress can’t get a tax bill across the finish line.
Give farmers a customer instead of a check, feed America with American grown agriculture and create a whole new incentive structure that allows American family farms to thrive year after year.
