Sometimes you need to put lipstick on a pig

Six months into my first job as pup reporter in another century, I pestered my boss to transfer me from the green fields of north-central Iowa to the story-littered streets of Washington, D.C., to cover the just-brewing 1980s ag crisis.

My pitch was earnest and honest: As the crisis began to bleed rural Americans’ profit and hope, government would be forced to take a more active role in everyday decision-making with programs like new farm loan guarantees, rural bank bailouts, more farm program payments and increased assistance for about-to-be-hammered rural communities.

My boss, a reliably cautious man, pondered the request for a week, then said no. His reasoning was straightforward and unforgettable: Congress, he explained, wasn’t interested in expanding government’s role in U.S. agriculture and neither were U.S. farmers.

So, he concluded, I wouldn’t be needed to cover that “big” story because it was going to be a big nonstory — not his best decision.

A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that direct farm program payments made to U.S. farmers since that 1981 nonstory have totaled, in nominal — not inflation-indexed — dollars, somewhere between $585 billion and $600 billion.

Indirect support payments like federal subsidies to crop insurance companies, “export enhancement” programs, decades-long import tariffs on commodities like ethanol and sugar, and any other of the now 150 U.S. Department of Agriculture-administered “farm” programs have added hundreds of billions more.

This generation-by-generation growth is almost perfectly displayed this year. According to USDA’s own forecast, direct federal farm support will hit $42.4 billion in 2025, a 354% increase over 2024’s $9.3 billion.

Only 2020’s $45.6 billion, the last time U.S. agriculture faced Trump administration-imposed trade tariffs, was larger.

Perhaps most surprising, 2025’s total net farm income, forecast at $180 billion, will be just $2 billion under 2022’s record net farm income of $182 billion. Interestingly, government farm payments that year were $27 billion less than this year’s near-record amount.

Farmers and ranchers aren’t the only ones watching this heavily-lobbied Congress send a river of taxpayer money to farmers.

Big ag-biz firms have an abiding interest in seeing steady-to-rising U.S. farm income and steady-to-rising government payments.

For example, Deere & Co.’s share prices soared from $418 on Jan. 2 to $514 on June 23, a remarkable 21% leap while the overall general stock market and most ag commodity markets have hovered on either side of flat over the same six-month period.

Government, of course, has dozens of ways to indirectly impact ag markets. Two weeks ago, farmers and ag-biz firms anxiously awaited word on how much biofuel production the Trump administration — no friend of biofuels in the past — would mandate for 2026.

Their fears, however, were sent packing by completely unforeseen good news.

“In a move that surprised biofuel industry analysts and sent soybean prices skyrocketing by 25 cents” — it was a modest, 2% ride skyward — the Environmental Protection Agency announced “its highest ever volume requirements for American grown biofuels in the Renewable Fuels Standard,” explained the Michigan Farm Bureau.

So, just like that, U.S. farmers now have another big, beautiful — and centrally planned — government program to continue to produce billions of bushels of corn and soy feedstock for biofuels that are, at best, debatably “green” and, and worst, not even necessary.

As such, it’s well-past time we call these ever larger, ever more costly transfer payment schemes to farmers — and the handful of the rural industrialists and multigenerational, corporate “family farms” who capture the vast majority of them — by their proper name: rural industrial policy.

Or, if you prefer, ag policy with lipstick.