15 Ways the Trump Administration is harming U.S. farmers and threatening food security

While using MAHA as a moral alibi

Last week, the USDA terminated 49 of 50 projects and nearly $300M in funding for locally led efforts helping young, beginning, and underserved farmers access land, capital, and markets.

As Jennifer O’Connor, Executive Director for Funders for Regenerative Agriculture, shared on LinkedIn, “These weren’t abstract programs. They were real, community-based solutions—designed and led by people who deeply understand the barriers farmers face every day.”

She continued, “This is not just a policy shift. We are watching a systematic dismantling of decades of work.”

I could not agree more. The systemic dismantling of decades of work, and the impact on our food and farm security will be felt for generations to come.

Food security is national security.

Here are fifteen ways the Trump administration is harming American farmers and food system security, with the receipts to back it up.

1. Tariffs triggered a devastating export collapse — and every type of farmer paid the price.

Under the Liberation Day tariffs, U.S. agricultural exports declined and the 2025 agricultural trade deficit increased by 10.8%. From February to October 2025 alone, tariffs increased the cost of goods like farm machinery and agricultural chemicals by $958 million. Organic farmers specifically reported concern about increases in the cost of machinery, feedstuffs, and energy.

The leading farm organizations warned that farmers and ranchers are “facing extreme economic pressures that threaten the long-term viability of the U.S. agriculture sector,” with farm bankruptcies continuing to climb.

2. Crop farmers lost $34.6 billion in a single year.

In 2025, crop farmers lost $34.6 billion, according to the American Farm Bureau. Bipartisan farming advocates warned that the industry could “collapse” in the near future, with the combination of a downturn cycle and current administration policies putting the sector in a precarious position. Organic vegetable farmer Brad Smith of Michigan said: “It does seem like there are more and more things that we used to think were safe and now I don’t know what’s going to happen next. There’s uncertainty over what’s going to be the state of the country in the next three or four years, and I’ve already noticed a drop in sales over the last year.”

3. China — America’s largest agricultural buyer — has walked away.

China historically bought slightly more than 50 percent of the $24.5 billion of produce that U.S. soybean farmers sold to international markets. U.S. exports to China fell by more than half, and China began buying more soybeans from Brazil and other South American nations.

This market loss falls especially hard on organic and regenerative farmers who rely on premium commodity exports, as once lost, those markets are extraordinarily difficult to reclaim from competitors like Brazil and Argentina.

4. Fertilizer costs exploded — with a staggering tariff pass-through.

A North Dakota State University study found that for widely used Diammonium Phosphate (DAP) fertilizer, the tariff pass-through rate to wholesale spot market prices hit a staggering 342 percent in August 2025. Even after the administration exempted fertilizers from tariffs in mid-November 2025, retail DAP prices remained $66 per metric ton above pre-tariff levels. Organic farmers, who depend on approved organic inputs that are already more expensive and harder to source, face compounding cost pressures that make transition and certification financially untenable.

5. DOGE gutted USDA and FDA — including the inspectors keeping food safe.

DOGE laid off approximately 6,000 USDA employees across a wide range of roles, from safety inspectors and quality assurance staff to trainers for disease-sniffing dogs. The NRCS alone lost almost 25 percent of its staff since January 2025. FDA inspectors who separated had an average of 19 years of experience, and FSIS employees had an average of 16 years of service. This is not bureaucratic trimming — it is the destruction of irreplaceable institutional knowledge.

6. The administration fired the people responding to bird flu — then scrambled to rehire them.

USDA accidentally fired “several” agency employees working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak and had to scramble to reverse the firings. For organic poultry and pasture-raised egg producers who operate without the industrial buffers of factory farming, disease outbreaks without adequate federal response infrastructure pose an existential business threat — precisely the kind that a fully staffed APHIS was built to prevent.

7. Foreign food safety inspections collapsed to historic lows.

Foreign food safety inspections by FDA fell to new lows in 2025 after budget cuts and mass layoffs. Monthly foreign inspection numbers fell by nearly half in March and remained about 30 percent lower through July compared to previous years. This is particularly damaging for domestic organic farmers: if staffing at the National Organic Program is cut, enforcement will weaken, fraud will rise, and American organic farms and businesses will be left vulnerable to foreign competition and market instability.

8. $1 billion cut from local food programs — destroying the market pipeline for small and organic farms.

The USDA terminated two key programs that provided funding for schools and state, tribal, and territorial governments to purchase food produced within local and regional ranges, halting about $1.1 billion in federal spending. These programs were a lifeline for small diversified, organic, and regenerative farms that sell into local and institutional markets rather than commodity supply chains — the exact farms that MAHA claims to champion.

9. The $3 billion Climate-Smart Commodities program — which paid conventional, organic, and regenerative farmers for soil health practices — was cancelled and rebranded.

The USDA ended a $3 billion program to help farmers use climate-friendly practices, with Trump administration officials calling it a “Biden era slush fund.” Federal funding freezes in 2025 adversely impacted farmers who had made investments based on approved grants through the Organic Market Development program and funding through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program in support of organic and transitioning farmers. “USDA funding, quite frankly, has been transformative for the regenerative agriculture movement,” said Ellen Griswold of Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture. “It’s a critical source of support, and if we see that it’s not continuing, it will certainly have significant ripple effects throughout the agriculture sector and especially for farmers who are interested in transitioning to regenerative practices.”

10. The Transition to Organic Partnership Program was frozen, then gutted — locking farmers out of an $80 billion market.

A pause was placed on the $85 million Organic Market Development Grant program and the $100 million Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP), causing countless farms, brands, and initiatives to halt or abandon their work altogether.

The economic stakes are staggering: the U.S. organic market is worth over $80 billion, but America is a net importer of organic food. American farmers lose $6 billion a year to foreign imports. The Transition to Organic Partnership Program was the first USDA program to really empower U.S. farmers to choose organic. When the program resumed, it was cut short by a year — so while some funding remains available, none will be available to support aspiring organic farmers past the fall of 2026.

11. Organic certification cost-share payments are simply not being paid — and no one at USDA will say when they will be.

As of April 2026, USDA has yet to initiate the 2025 application and payment process for funds authorized by Congress to help farmers afford organic certification. Three months into 2026, the agency has not indicated when those funds might be made available.

“It’s the small farms where it really makes a financial impact,” said Kate Mendenhall, executive director of the Organic Farmers Association. The ripple effects are already hitting the supply chain: Mendenhall reported that because fewer organic farmers have been using her meat processor, the processor dropped its organic certification — meaning she can no longer label her own meat as USDA Certified Organic.

12. The MAHA “regenerative” pilot program is greenwashing — too narrow, understaffed, and underfunded to deliver what it promises.

The Trump administration’s $700 million Regenerative Agriculture Initiative will only be effective if USDA reverses the past year of massive cuts to on-the-ground conservation staff. Regenerative agriculture requires whole-farm, science-based planning, and right now the agency lacks the army of specialists needed to help farmers design and implement those plans. The new initiative only allows farmers to choose from 17 conservation practices — a fraction of the more than 50 practices the NRCS listed as eligible for climate-smart conservation funding in 2024. And it’s a trifling amount compared with the billions commodity farmers received in 2025.

13. Agricultural research — including organic research — was targeted for elimination.

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funds agricultural research at land-grant universities and other institutions, would be cut by $602 million under Trump’s proposed budget, with the administration saying it eliminates “wasteful, woke programming” related to climate change and renewable energy. The Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative — USDA’s flagship organic research program funding studies to improve organic farming methods, soil health, and climate resilience — was frozen for months. Without this research pipeline, organic and regenerative farmers lose the science they depend on to improve yields, manage pests without synthetic inputs, and adapt to extreme weather.

14. Conservation Technical Assistance — the backbone of on-farm transition support — was gutted, concentrating what remains with the largest operations.

Under USDA’s proposed budget, discretionary funding for Conservation Technical Assistance would fall from $776.5 million in FY2025 to zero. The FY2026 appropriations bill cut nearly $100 million and, without payment limits for EQIP and CSP, paves the way for very large operations to consume disproportionate amounts of conservation dollars. For organic and regenerative farmers — who rely heavily on NRCS technical staff to design cover crop plans, soil health systems, and grazing rotations — this is the difference between a viable transition and an impossible one.

15. The FY2027 budget doubles down — proposing another $4.9 billion in USDA cuts while calling the agency “bloated,” and sets up a permanent structural bias against smaller, sustainable producers.

The White House has proposed a 19 percent cut in the USDA budget for fiscal year 2027, calling USDA a “bloated” bureaucracy with programs “irrelevant to supporting an America First agricultural policy.” The administration’s so-called return to “free markets” is not a rollback to the pre-Biden status quo — it is an aggressive acceleration toward deeper consolidation, climate vulnerability, and racial inequity. The proposal would also eliminate the Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole Food for Education programs, which Congress has repeatedly refused to kill because they purchase crops directly from U.S. farmers. Every cut in this budget lands harder on organic, regenerative, and small-scale farmers who have fewer industrial subsidies to fall back on and no corporate lobby to protect them.

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The central contradiction: MAHA says it wants a food system built on clean soil, chemical-free farming, and real nutrition. The farmers who have dedicated their lives and livelihoods to building exactly that system — organic growers paying for certification out of pocket, regenerative ranchers who made investments based on signed federal contracts, small farms building soil health one cover crop at a time — have been abandoned, defunded, and left holding the bill. Meanwhile, the commodity monocrops and factory farms that produce the ultra-processed food MAHA rails against received tens of billions more in subsidies.

MAHA promises a movement — but it is a moral alibi. It gives the administration the language of health and wholeness while it executes the most aggressive dismantling of American food system infrastructure in modern history. It lets officials invoke "real food" and "soil health" at press conferences while, with the other hand, they cancel the contracts of the organic farmers who grow that real food, fire the NRCS specialists who build that soil health, gut the research programs that make regenerative transition possible, and hand the resulting budget savings to the industrial commodity operations that manufacture the ultra-processed food MAHA was supposedly created to fight. The cynicism is precise and the hypocrisy is load-bearing: without the MAHA brand, these cuts would be recognized immediately for what they are — a transfer of public agricultural wealth from small farms, sustainable producers, and rural communities to consolidated agribusiness, dressed up as fiscal efficiency.

Americans who care about where their food comes from, how it is grown, and who gets to grow it should see this clearly: when an administration talks about healthy food while defunding the farmers who produce it, the agenda was never health.

It is a consolidation agenda wearing a moral alibi and a wellness costume.

Robyn O’Brien began her career as a financial analyst covering the food industry and later became one of the earliest voices identifying systemic risks and investment opportunities driven by shifts in consumer demand, health, and environmental pressures. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Unhealthy Truth, How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It, published by Random House in 2009.