President Trump’s bailout is a Band Aid for a farm economy that is hemorrhaging. We need to ask why U.S. farmers and rural communities are so vulnerable to tariffs from other countries. The answer is a broken farm policy, created by corporate agribusiness, that prioritizes overproduction over everything else — including our farmers, our communities and our environment.

Here in Iowa, we see the results of this Farm Bill in the wave of new and expanding factory farms producing pork for export markets. Iowa communities are already dealing with 750 impaired waterways; the loss of independent family farm livestock producers, and the decline of our rural communities, all caused by over 10,000 factory farms in this state. Nearly all the benefits are extracted to the corporations who do the exporting.

The expansion of new factory farms is fueled with government-backed loans to build new factory farms, economic development funding to help locate new slaughterhouses, and government subsidies for factory farms to handle the massive amounts of manure they create.

Decades of corporate-controlled markets and farm policy that incentivize overproduction have put farmers in this vulnerable position — dependent on fickle export markets, that can vanish overnight. We need a functional marketplace where farmers are paid fairly, our rural communities supported and our environment protected.  

Congress is working on the Farm Bill right now. Instead of pointing fingers about the right short-term measure to help farmers survive Trump’s trade war, let’s fix our broken farm policy. A good first step would be to stop corporate factory farms from exploiting taxpayer-funded conservation programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the taxpayer-funded guaranteed loan program to build even more factory farms.

CFFE consists of Dakota Rural Action (SD), Food & Water Watch, Institute for Ag & Trade Policy, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (IA), Land Stewardship Project (MN) & Missouri Rural Crisis Center (MO).