Summary
Michigan farmer Rebecca Carlson, a longtime Trump supporter, faces bankruptcy as Trump’s funding freezes stall a $400,000 USDA grant for hiring temporary workers.
Carlson, who hoped Trump’s second term would revive her struggling cherry farm, already spent $200,000 preparing for labor under the H-2A visa program.
With funding halted, she risks losing $200,000 more and can’t move forward with critical hires.
Trump’s new tariffs and immigration crackdowns threaten agriculture costs and labor availability, leaving farmers uncertain and frustrated with unmet promises.
It’s only half-topical, but let me say one thing: farmers are romanticised waaay too much in my opinion. Yes, they usually have a more precarious business, and agriculture as such is, of course, very much the foundation of our societies and very lives.
But don’t be blinded by the image of homesteading and such - most farmers are basically just business owners, with their class interests often removing them from a large part of the population. Many of the seasonal workers for example have shit pay on top of shit conditions, and they are notoriously overrepresented with some kind of “rurally wholesome” image, when they can be just as much business assholes, that mainly own a piece of land and the machinery necessary to use it for agriculture.
This will only get worse, because bankruptcy like this has one main effect: consolidation, even more farmland operated by big business, even though I personally think small business like this one is clearly already not as good as people tend to make it out as.
People romanticize farming because it was the basis of society and its economy 100 years ago. Agriculture was key to human survival for millenia before that.
In our increasingly tech driven lives, there’s something pure about your work being dedicated to cultivating the earth and bringing sustenance to people.
But there are modern US farm owners that harken the image of plantation owners during America’s chattel slavery era. Exploiting undocumented workers with undignified working conditions and paying them insufficiently in exchange for irreversibly wearing down their bodies.
Agreed, and to add to this, I grew up in farmland and have never met a broke farmer. These folks are typically quite wealthy thanks to massive government subsidies. Huge modern home, brand new cars, plenty of toys like ATVs. They’re not living the same life as the standard working class.