800 326 9054President Donald Trump and senior officials said Monday that the administration will provide $12 billion in financial support for farmers, with the first $11 billion going to row crop producers before the end of February 2026.
“This relief will provide much-needed certainty to farmers as they get this year’s harvest to market and look ahead to next year’s crops,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House Monday afternoon to announce the assistance.
The president was joined by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman, R-Ark., and Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb, as well as Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., and a group of farmers, for the announcement.
The first $11 billion will go to row crops to serve as a “bridge payment” until the “new golden age” when farmers can support themselves without relying on government assistance, Rollins said during the roundtable. Rollins added that the money will begin to be distributed by Feb. 28 next year and assured growers that they would have an indication of the size of their forthcoming payments before the new year.
When farmers approach lenders to borrow money and begin making plans for the next planting season, “you will have that number in hand,” Rollins said during Monday’s roundtable.
Row crop producers are expected to receive substantial payments on 2025 crops because of changes made to the Price Loss Coverage and Agriculture Risk Coverage programs under the One Big Beautiful Act enacted in July, but that money won’t go out until October 2026.
The $11 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) program will distribute payments to barley, chickpea, corn, cotton, lentil, oat, peanut, pea, rice, sorghum, soybeans, wheat, canola, crambe, flax, mustard, rapeseed, safflower, sesame, and sunflower growers, USDA said in a statement on the new assistance. The department added that the payments would help address “market disruptions,” higher input costs, inflation and export losses.
“The FBA Program applies simple, proportional support to producers using a uniform formula to cover a portion of modeled losses during the 2025 crop year,” USDA’s statement reads, with the loss calculations based on reported planted acres, cost of production estimates, World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates for yields and prices, and “economic modeling.”
The last $1 billion, Rollins said, will eventually be awarded to specialty crop producers. But Rollins said that the administration is still working “to best understand where they are in the farm economy.” USDA says sugar producers could also see payments from this funding.
During the roundtable, Trump suggested that tariffs would fund the assistance, but Rollins clarified to reporters after the event that the funding would come from the Commodity Credit Corporation – the same vehicle Trump used to fund trade assistance during his first term.
“The tariffs we consider an offset,” Rollins told reporters.
Boozman welcomed the administration’s announcement and hinted in comments during the roundtable that Congress could follow up with further assistance in the future.
“If we need some additional help,” Boozman added “looking to Congress, we’ll be there.” The payments, Boozman argued, would provide farmers with much-needed certainty.
In addition to announcing the new assistance package, Trump also said that the administration is weighing loosening environmental regulations on agricultural machinery.
“We’re going to take a lot of that nonsense off of the equipment,” he said. But he added that the looser restrictions would come with the stipulation that any cost savings are passed on to consumers.
Cordt Holub, an Iowa farmer, told the president at the roundtable that the aid announcement had “brought Christmas to farmers.”
“We’ll be able to farm another year,” he said.
Meryl Kennedy, founder and CEO of Kennedy Rice Mill and 4 Sisters Rice, pointed out that although the tariff assistance is welcome, market dynamics continue to weigh on southern rice farmers. She told the president that India and Thailand are dumping subsidized rice products on the U.S. market and undercutting domestic producers.
“We’ll take care of it,” the president responded. “Tariffs again,” Trump added, “it solves the problem in two minutes.”
The U.S. is still negotiating the terms of a trade pact with India. Indian officials have told their domestic media that they hope to conclude a deal before the end of the year.
Farm groups were quick to celebrate the prospect of additional aid. National Council of Farmer Cooperatives President Duane Simpson called the support “timely and necessary.”
Growers are navigating “one of the toughest economic periods we’ve seen in years,” Simpson said in a statement. Taking both export losses and low commodity prices into account “is essential to ensuring that the aid reflects real-world conditions on the ground,” he added.
Democrats were already branding the assistance package as a “tariff bailout” before the Monday afternoon roundtable had concluded. The Democratic National Committee cited comments from a Cornell University economist warning that government assistance will only provide limited short-term relief without making farmers whole or addressing a growing trade problem.
“No short-term government bailout can make farmers whole for the loss of entire export markets,” the DNC said in a statement. “Once foreign buyers move to new producers — which we’ve seen with Chinese soybean purchases shifting heavily to Brazil and Argentina — those relationships are difficult or even impossible to win back.”
The bottom line, the DNC said, is that the president “wants credit for handing them a Band-Aid that won’t solve their problems.”
Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., also argued that the assistance announced won’t even get the farm economy back to where it was before Trump took office.
Farmers, he said, “are still paying more for fertilizer, equipment and seeds, while grown-in-the-USA farm goods are facing more obstacles than ever in foreign markets.”
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*Sourced from Agri-Pulse.